If he was no success as a douanier, he was learning a great deal, meanwhiles, about those delicate and radiant skies which cover Paris at all times, charming always for their lightness and delicacy, pearl-like in their quiet splendour; and it was during this service of his at the city's gates that he learned his lovely sense of blacks and greys and silvers, of which Paris offers so much always, and which predominate in his canvases. Even his tropical scenes strive in no way toward artificiality of effect, but give rather the sense of their profundity than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been at home in them in his imagination, being so well at home in those scenes of Paris which were daily life to him. We find in Rousseau true naivete, without struggle, real child-likeness of attitude and of emotion, following diligently with mind and with spirit the forms of those stored images that have registered themselves with directness upon the area of his imagination, never to be forgotten, rendered with perfect simplicity for us in these quaint pictures of his, superb in the richness of quality which makes of them, what they are to the eye that is sympathetic to them, pictures out of a life undisturbed by all the machinations and intrigues of the outer world, a life intimate with itself, remote from all agencies having no direct association with it, living with a sweet gift of enchantment with the day's disclosures, occupied apparently with nothing beyond the loveliness contained in them. There is not once, anywhere, a striving of the mind in the work of this simple man. It was a wealth of innocence that tinged all his methods, and his pictures are as simple in their appeal as are the declarations of Jacob Boehme--they are the songs of innocence and experience of a nature for whom all the world was beautiful, and have about them the element of song itself, a poetry that has not yet reached the shaping of words. Who looks at the pictures of this true and charming naif, will find nothing to wonder at beyond this extreme simplicity, he had no prescribed attitude, no fixity of image that characterizes every touch of school. He was taught only by nature and consulted only her relationships and tendencies. There is never a mistaking of that. Nature was his influence, and he saw with an untrammelled eye the elemental shape of all things, and affixed no falsity of feeling, or anything, to his forms which might have detracted from their extreme simplicity. He had "first sight," first contact with the image, and sought nothing else beyond this, and a very direct correspondence with memories dictated all his efforts.