For such a nature who would predict happiness? Fortune satisfied that inborn melancholy to the full. The years brought increasing poverty, and the cares of providing for himself and for his father wore the artist down. The autumn of 1681 found him ill and helpless; so helpless that the religious community to which he belonged, the sect of Mennonites, procured admission for him to their almshouse at Haarlem. There he lingered till the next spring. In March he was buried in St. Bavon’s. VI Ruisdael’s etchings are but twelve, or perhaps thirteen, in number; only seven being catalogued by Bartsch. Their fewness shows, what their technical qualities confirm, that the artist neither had great aptitude for this method of expression nor cared to pursue his experiments in it far. They all belong to his earliest period. One, the _Three Oaks_ (B. 6), is dated 1649, and it is difficult to assign any of the others, except possibly the _Cornfield_, to a later date. Of the four large plates, the one which Bartsch calls _Les Voyageurs_ (B. 4), is decidedly the most interesting. It is a forest scene, wild and intricate, with water running or standing in pools among the great roots of the oak which occupies the centre and of the beech which fills the left. The two figures are passing in the middle distance, where the wood is clearer. It is a remnant, perhaps, of that vast forest which at one time covered the whole of Holland. Ruisdael’s strong feeling for old trees, for the solitude of forests, densely branching and mysterious, inspires him here; and one has only to turn to the facile etchers of sylvan scenery, Waterloo or Swanevelt, or Van der Cabel, to realise the difference between the man who feels what he cannot perfectly master and the man who has perfect mastery of a facile formula. Ruisdael never succeeded in finding a quite satisfactory convention for foliage in etched line; but his continual feeling after truth of rendering, his sensitiveness, to which the forms of branch and leaf are always fresh and wonderful, make his work always interesting. The three other large plates (B. 1-3) are less successful handlings of the same kind of subject. Though the first, _The Little Bridge_, is not a forest scene, and represents a decayed old farm-building, it is penetrated with the same feeling for picturesque, moss-grown antiquity and neglected solitude. The _Three Oaks_ are etched with truth and strength, but they do not rival the grandeur of the oak in the larger plate. The _Cornfield_ (Fig. 17) is sunny and pleasant.