The closing scene in the drama of Hokusai’s life is full of pathos. Though his whole career had been shadowed by poverty, and shrouded in obscurity, his art still held him earth-bound. Upon his death-bed he said, “If Heaven would only grant me ten more years!” Then, as he realized that the end approached, he murmured, “If Heaven had but granted me five more years I could have been a real painter.” So ended the life of the master of Ukiyo-ye. His body lies beneath the pines of Asakusa, but would we not gladly believe that his “soul turned Will-o’-the-wisp, may ever come and go at ease, over the summer fields,”—for this was the last expression of his passionate desire. Hiroshige. Landscape Painter and Apostle of Impressionism. If the lovely “Land of the Rising Sun” should, during one of those volcanic throes which threaten her extinction, sink forever beneath the depths of ocean, she would yet live for us through the magic brush of Hiroshige. Gazing at his landscapes, the airy wing of imagination wafts us to a land of showers and sunsets—a fairy scene, where the rainbow falls to earth, shattered into a thousand prisms—where waters softly flow towards horizons touched with daffodil or azure tinted. Here is a gliding _sampan_ with closed shutters. Inside, the lantern’s diffused light throws a silhouette upon the bamboo curtain, a drooping girlish head bending towards the unseen lover at her feet. Ripples play upon the water, stirred by the amorous breath of oriental night. In fancy we hear the tinkling of the samisen, touched by delicate fingers, sweetly perfumed. Now we see rain upon the Tokaido. A skurrying storm. Affrighted coolies running this way and that. A mountain full of echoes and horror. Down it splash rivulets, running into inky pools. Darkness and terror and loneliness, and longing for warmth and shelter and the peace of home. In marked contrast is one of the “Seven Impressions of Hakone.” A glad reveille. The sun breaks out, the clouds have burst asunder, masses of vapour float here and there. All is chaotic, untamed, a palette wildly mingled. The Japanese so dearly love Nature, in all her moods, that when she dons her mantle of snow they hesitate, even when necessity compels, to sully its purity. In one of Utamaro’s prints, sweetly entitled by M. Edmond de Goncourt “La Nature Argentée,” a little musüme is seen searching the snowy landscape she loves, and, hating to blot the beautiful carpet, she cries, “Oh, the beautiful new snow! Where shall I throw the tea-leaves?” With Hiroshige, the artist of snow and mist, we feel this love, and so successfully, does he deal with a snowy landscape that we see the snow in masses, luminous, soft and unsullied, as if Nature had lent a helping hand to portray her pure white magic. So, without formula or technique, but absolutely and sincerely, he unrolls the winter pageant before us.