hardly ever had his equal in transposing a piece into different keys. Admiration for the almost morbidly exaggerated sensitiveness to the slightest differences in tones of colour, and sympathetic feeling for the artist’s despair at the inadequacy of a technique, gross, after all, as the medium of the most delicate intentions—these are the impressions which one feels at even the most friendly consideration of Sisley’s most successful works. Dreaming and longing, reminiscence and presentiment, on the other hand, they never inspire, for they are absolutely lacking in all psychic, emotional, and imaginative sense. From the example of Sisley, we recognise the accuracy of the maxim which, when put nakedly, sounds almost provokingly paradoxical, and yet is literally correct, viz., that landscape painting, or, at any rate, a certain kind of landscape painting, is the most literary of all species of plastic art, the one from which the least is received, and into which the most is put. Landscape painting seems to reproduce nature herself, and therefore necessarily to be as objective as a land surveyor’s plan, or even as a photograph. It is, as a matter of fact, incomparably more subjective than portrait, historical, or _genre_ painting, for there is throughout, not nature over again, but the features of nature which have excited the attention of the painter, and aroused in him a mood. It therefore discloses to us, more than any other kind of painting, the soul of the painter, the peculiarity of his mode of feeling, the bent of his dreams, and the object of his longing. If every work of art is a confession on the part of the artist, landscape painting is a particularly complete and honest acknowledgment. It is a portrait of the artist, which he himself has painted, transcribing all the wrinkles of his soul. Nature in herself is absolutely expressionless. The feeling of the person who contemplates her first adds expression, just as his senses translate the movements of the atmosphere and matter, which are, in themselves, devoid of colour and sound to the perceptible values of colours and tones. The contemplation of nature awakens in us associations of ideas, and these we project into nature. Therefore we find, again, in this latter the whole range of emotion and thought of our consciousness, and nature, therefore, influences every one who contemplates her correspondingly to his education and mental habits.