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GUERNSEY CLIFFS, CHANNEL ISLANDS

​ ​and he could, even early in life, take note of opportunity with foresight and courage that yielded him the freedom his art required. He knew his strength very justly, and he shrewdly relied on it. Mr. Willcox says: "He amazed me by getting married and resigning his position as designer in order to devote himself entirely to his art. I don't remember which event took place first, but I thought the latter extremely unwise—and so it would have been with anyone else, but timidity had no place in his nature."

All this denotes a touch of life beyond the monopolizing palette, and in the same vein lie the wide sympathies with other intellectual currents which made Mr. Richards' company so alluring. He was apt in all the pleasant devices of conversation, full of humor and quiet laughter, full of diverting stories from his travels and his contact with life in many countries, and full of that large acquaintance with books that furnishes a ripe mind with overflowing talk. His household was ​always strewed with books and his memory was strewed with their varied contents. But his favorite subject, with me, at least, was poetry, and among poets, of Wordsworth. He would quote short passages—I remember, of the "River Duddon" sonnets—and other beautiful and tranquil things, and talk on and on, lying back easily in his chair in the fullest enjoyment of the subject, until this would lead him to, perhaps, religion and creed and dogma, when he would utter those independent views of his in well-chosen fluency and show the fuller deeps of that ripe and original mind which had found so many secrets of the land and sea.