“Colts on a Norfolk Marsh, this plate I consider focussed absolutely correctly. The colts are just out of sharpest focus, the tree in middle distance out of focus, yet correct, and distance out of focus, yet correct.”  ⎯ P.H. Emerson, Sept., 1889,  To The Student 

From Chapter VIII: Work and Play

“Our second plate gives us quite a different scene. On a marsh, huddling by a picturesque bridge, some colts stand on the alert, ready with all the unreason of youth to gallop wildly to the other side of the marsh on our approach.

In the distance feeds a mare and foal on the sweet spring grass. These young colts have as yet escaped the hard toil and drudgery of life; but few stiff pulls have fallen to their lot; their chief battles have as yet been with the seasons’ changes, with the biting blasts of winter, with the scorching suns of summer. But soon will their days of joyful wandering be over; soon will their wild spirits be broken, and they will take their places amongst the baggage-animals of life, returning only to the marshes in burdensome senility. Mayhap, like poor Trompette in “Germinal,” some of them are doomed to work in gloomy darkness for evermore, pulling the coal-laden trucks away down in the bowels of the earth.” p. 73