Lesueur and Poussin, by very different but nearly equal titles, are at the head of our great painting of the seventeenth century. After them, what artists again are Claude Lorrain and Philippe de Champagne? Do you know in Italy or Holland a greater landscape painter than Claude? And seize well his true character. Look at those vast and beautiful solitudes, lighted by the first or last rays of the sun, and tell me whether those solitudes, those trees, those waters, those mountains, that light, that silence,--whether all that nature has a soul, and whether those luminous and pure horizons do not lift you involuntarily, in ineffable reveries, to the invisible source of beauty and grace! Lorrain is, above all, the painter of light, and his works might be called the history of light and all its combinations, in small and great, when it is poured out over large plains or breaks in the most varied accidents, on land, on waters, in the heavens, in its eternal source. The human scenes thrown into one corner have no other object than to relieve and make appear to advantage the scenes of nature by harmony or contrast. In the _Village Fete_, life, noise, movement are in front,--peace and grandeur are at the foundation of the landscape, and that is truly the picture. The same effect is in the _Cattle Crossing a River_. The landscape placed immediately under your eyes has nothing in it very rare, we can find such a one anywhere; but follow the perspective,--it leads you across flowering fields, a beautiful river, ruins, mountains that overlook these ruins, and you lose yourself in infinite distances. That Landscape crossed by a river, where a peasant waters his herd, means nothing great at first sight. Contemplate it some time, and peace, a sort of meditativeness in nature, a well-graduated perspective, will, little by little, gain your heart, and give you in that small picture a penetrating charm. The picture called a _Landscape_ represents a vast champagne filled with trees, and lighted by the rising sun,--in it there is freshness and--already--warmth, mystery, and splendor, with skies of the sweetest harmony. _A Dance at Sunset_ expresses the close of a beautiful day. One sees in it, one feels in it the decline of the heat of the day; in the foreground are some shepherds and shepherdesses dancing by the side of their flocks.[144]