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

Four years were thus passed in the study of the old masters.

But at length she was forced to answer the question, to what particular aim were her efforts to be directed? Should she become an historical painter? That would be to forget that she was a woman. Should she be a genre painter? That was something which did not meet the inmost bent and quality of her mind.

Then it was that the remembrance of her early wanderings in the “Bois de Boulogne” came freshly to her. She recalled the long delights and delicious dreams that she had, as a child, in communion with open nature in the fields and woods, and she awoke to the fact that she was to be a painter of pastoral nature.

Immediately, with the energy of will which she put into everything that she undertook, and which Goethe says makes the difference between the great and small mind, she began to study, not the painted classical landscapes, with their eternal mountains like mill-stones, and their Arcadian fountains covered with Greek inscriptions, but the streams, woods, fields, and mountains near at hand, of God's making, and covered with their living flocks and herds.

Every morning Rosa departed with her painting apparatus, and some simple provision for her noontide meal, crossing the city barriers, and straying, wherever her fancy led her, in the green fields around Paris.

After having walked a long distance into the country, she rested at the border of some stream, prepared the colors of her palette, and made a rapid sketch of the scene where she happened to be.

She returned home worn out with fatigue, and often with her garments drenched and covered with mud; but this did not prevent her from doing the same thing the next day,

Her attention was even then given to animated nature,