St Augustin were to be found in them. The boy Millet devoured this strong intellectual food. He had an especial passion for the Bible, which he read in Latin, and for Virgil, beloved by many other great French painters of the period: Delacroix, Corot and Rousseau. The Bucolics and the Georgics enchanted him. He tells us himself that when he came to the line: "It is the hour when the great shadows seek the plain"
Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
Majoresque cadunt altes de montibus umbrae.[1]
he felt quite disturbed and seized by emotion. As to the Bible, it has been said already that an old illustrated edition first inspired him with the idea of expressing himself in art. To this earliest stratum of his reading which gave him, unawares, the soul of a Frenchman of the seventeenth century, he by and by added a great number of other books. Millet all his life was a great reader. At twenty he discovered Homer, Shakespeare, Byron, Walter
- ↑ "And now all around and afar smoke rises from the roofs of farms and the large shadows fall from the high mountains."
38
