It is, for me, impossible to look at Corot's work without feeling that his was, if I may put it so, a monastic nature. Here is a serene and cloistered art, something secluded from the traffic of the everyday world, a vision intense rather than wide. I think of Corot as a priest at the altar of one of Nature's innermost sanctuaries celebrating sacramental mysteries. Every picture that came from him is an elevation of the Host. This is the quality in his work, much more than a fastidious refinement nearer the surface, that gives it so high a distinction. Hung in a gallery among other pictures, a Corot does not clamour for notice. It is much too quiet in matter and manner for that; but, after awhile, it draws the eye, and when it has done so its hold is secure. The surrounding canvases almost invariably begin to look a little vulgar in its neighbourhood. And this not only because rioting colour might well look blatant by the side of the tender greys and greens and rose flushes that the artist loved so well, but because the spirituality of which those tones are merely the expression places the Corot upon another and a higher plane. To come upon a Corot in a gallery is like stepping out of the noisy glare of the market-place into the cool stillness of a church. Market-places are good things, and the noisy crowd is perhaps only noisy because it is doing its appointed work in a right hearty fashion; but the Presence seems nearer in the silence of the church. The silence is not dead, but quick with soundless speech. So with a Corot picture; its quietness is the very antipodes of stagnation. It seems to spread far beyond the limits of the frame in ever-widening waves, until everything around is subdued. [Illustration: PLATE III.--LES CHAUMIÈRES Luminous and almost uncannily true in tone, "Les Chaumières" takes high rank among the finest productions of Corot's maturer years. It is the work of a man who "knows," who is able to take hold of essentials, and let non-essentials go, with a certainty of discrimination. Profound knowledge, so thoroughly assimilated as to be instinctive in its application, can alone account for both the completeness and simplicity of the landscape, the result achieved with apparently so absolute a lack of effort.] The only other works of art which have ever given me quite the same impression in this direction are one or two of those dreaming Buddhas that, wherever they may be, seem to be shrined in a stillness emanating from themselves.