Lyrical landscape is that which is perhaps also designated landscape of mood. It is more consistent with nature than literary landscape. It owes much less to reminiscence of books or plays; its only relation to literature is that through this the painter is schooled to be more susceptible of certain features of nature. Landscape pictures of this species could be painted under some circumstances by artists who had never read a book or heard a poem, if only their own disposition were attuned to poetry. For this painting the landscape itself is a poem—ballad, romance, or idyll, in many cases, perhaps, even a melodrama. It tells some tale, or hints at one, the more delicately so much the more expressively. The wrinkles of the ground, the irregularity and abruptness of the lines of mountains, the gloom of the woods, awaken presentiments; our yearning follows the paths which are lost in the blue distance, or behind hills and bends; coolness rises from the foaming rivulet; mystery broods over the motionless fish-pond. Everything unspoken, or partly unspeakable, which a keenly perceptive man of deep contemplation imports into nature, moves and reigns in and over the lyric landscape painting. It expresses a complex, subjective mood, embracing in itself many elements of sense, feeling, and thought—the joy of spring, the melancholy of autumn, the cheerlessness of winter, the shudder at the weird, the dread of eternity. It is viewed anthropomorphically. It owes its strongest effects to traits which do not exist in nature herself, but are added to her by human imagination. Japanese art knows only lyric landscape. In Europe it was first developed by the great Dutchmen, Ruysdael and Van Ostade, to attain in Corot its zenith unsurpassed up to the present time. As it lays expression into its forms, it must figure the latter distinctly. It draws and composes, therefore, with deliberation. It proceeds from the realistically rendered topographical anecdote, even if it achieves this by the transcendental.