generation in which he had no part. The period of historical painting which followed him produced no single work distinguished by Schwind's sense of fragrant legendary poetry. The charming forest fairy who had appeared to him showed herself to no other; like the betrayed Melusina, she had returned to rest again, solitary, in her fountain home. Fantasy, tender soul that she is, had taken wings, whither none can tell. "That is why nobody has a single idea," as Schwind said in his drastic way. The Muse of Schwind, the last Romanticist, was a chaste, pensive, soulful maiden; while that of Piloty, the first colourist, was a noisy, bloodthirsty Megæra. Yet one can have no doubt as to the necessity of this evolutionary change. [Illustration: _Albert, Helio._ SCHWIND. RUBEZAHL.] Schwind himself is among the masters "who have been, and are, and shall be." He was different from all that was arising around him; he embodied the spirit of the future, and exercises over the art of the present day so great an influence that where two or three painters are gathered together in the name of the beautiful, he has his place in the midst of them, and is present, invisible, at every exhibition. But he exercises this influence only spiritually. Young artists study him as if he were a primitive master. Enraptured, they find in him all those qualities for which there is to-day so ardent a longing--innocent purity and touching simplicity, a mystic, romantic submersion in waves of old-time feeling and a charming youthful fervour. They do not study him in order to _paint_ like him. "Our heads are full of poetry, but we cannot give it expression," are the words with which Cornelius himself characterised this period. Germany had original geniuses indeed, but no fully matured school to compare with the French; as yet the Germans did not know how to paint. Up to this time the course of painting in Germany had been a bold but imprudent flight through the air; in its Kaulbach-like cloud-heights it had melted away to a shadow, only to fall again, somewhat roughly, to the ground. It died of an incurable disease--idealism. The painters of that time, one and all, had never become real artists; strictly speaking, they had always remained amateurs. He alone is a great artist in whom the will and the performance, the substance and the form, are in complete accordance. Painters who never knew exactly what is meant by painting, artists whose most noticeable characteristic was that they had no art-capacity, were only possible in the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany, where for that very reason they were admired and praised.