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No hunting-trophies, no heads of slaughtered wild things disfigured the walls, as in most bungalows; but the flickering firelight showed pictures that inspired thought and carried lessons home pictures of toil and of repose, pictures of life, and love, and simple joy pictures of tragedy, of reality and deep significance. Here one saw Millet's "Sower," and "Gleaners" and "The Man with the Hoe."
"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. Hast thou not often thought of this as thou hast seen the sower and the reaper in his season?" "Aye, of the Kingdom thy words be comforting. But to my heart thou art dearer than e'en the Kingdom." "Fear not death. Death is but change.
Of the sowing of St. Lusson at the "Soo" and La Salle at New Orleans we have spoken. Long later , the first of whom we have record after La Salle, another French sower went forth to sow along the rivers close to the foot of the Alleghany Mountains Celoron de Bienville, Chevalier de St. Louis.
Was it not written, "For as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth.
There was nothing in the subject to connect it particularly with any religious symbolism not even with the Parable of the Sower who went forth to sow; nor with any series of personifications of the months. This was a simple peasant of the Norman coast, in his red blouse and blue trousers, his legs wrapped in straw, and his weather-beaten hat, full of holes.
Every cast was made with care, in a spirit of kindly resignation. Look! the tiny grains that are to take life and grow, shoot up into ears, and give more corn again; so it is throughout all the earth where corn is sown. Palestine, America, the valleys of Norway itself a great wide world, and here is Isak, a tiny speck in the midst of it all, a sower.
When we find human forms suggesting a superhuman dignity, as in Watts' figures of Time and Death, or in the Phidian marbles, the type is there melting into the archetype. When Millet paints a peasant figure of today with some gesture we imagine the first Sower must have used, it is the eternal in it which makes the transitory impressive.
The fields were busy with people ploughing and sowing; every here and there a jug of ale stood in the angle of the hedge, and I could see many a team wait smoking in the furrow as ploughman or sower stepped aside for a moment to take a draught. Over all the brown ploughlands, and under all the leafless hedgerows, there was a stout piece of labour abroad, and, as it were, a spirit of picnic.
April 18. Went out three or four miles to the house of Quincy Shaw, to see a collection of J. F. Millet's pictures. Two rapt hours. Never before have I been so penetrated by this kind of expression. I stood long and long before "the Sower." I believe what the picture-men designate "the first Sower," as the artist executed a second copy, and a third, and, some think, improved in each.
For, since then, the delver and sower for centuries the slave of the Roman, and, for centuries after, the slave of Teutonic or Saracenic conquerors has become his own master, and his own landlord; and an impulse has been given to industry, which is shown by trim cottages, gay gardens, and fresh olive orchards, pushed up into glens which in a state of nature would starve a goat.
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