James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

[601] gallery, is a charming pastoral landscape in the heart of sunny France, breathing the tranquil repose of nature, which softens and refines the manifestations of rough animal force. Yet how admirable the hearty strain and tug of the great oxen under the encouraging voice of their driver, as the ploughshare mounts a little rising slope of the furrowed field! One powerful white bull in the team, less tractable to the yoke than his fellows, still hangs back with a sullen light in his eye. A long, flowering shrub has been laid over upon its side by the cruel share; while, on the very edge of the ploughed ground, another little flower, untouched, lifts up its pretty, fearless head. But it is not often that our artist indulges in such delicate feminine touches as this; for her genius is bold and strong, and vies with that of man, despising the appeal to the mere poetic sensibility.

Such rural groups as “The Cantal oxen,” “Hay-making,” “Morning in the Highlands,” “Denizens of the mountains,” and others, are grand pastoral pictures, in which the animals seem to be, as they should, but parts of the wide and open nature.

One of her cattle-scenes tells its story at a glance. A majestic bull stands in the centre of the group, in the full perfection of his strength, the monarch of the fields. An older bull and cows lie around on the grass of a high table-land, intermixed with heather, with a wide horizon of craggy mountains in the distance.

A little way off from the central group stands, somewhat foreshortened, and as if cast in iron, a massive young bull, with a lowering and jealous expression of countenance, looking toward his companions, his horns like short daggers, and his tail brandished in air, as if he were already measuring in his rude breast the strength of his antagonist, which ere long is to be tested in deadly combat.

But there is no forcing of such a meaning on the beholder.