The journey to Morocco, which he made in the spring of 1832, in company with an embassy sent by Louis Philippe to the Emperor Muley Abderrahman, is noteworthy for a further progress in his ability as a colourist and a new broadening of his range of subjects. When he returned to the port of Toulon, on 5th July 1832, he had seen Algiers and Spain, and had assimilated an abundance of sunshine and colour. It is in his Oriental pictures that his painting first reaches its zenith, just as Victor Hugo's mastery over language was at its highest point in his _Orientales_. Goethe, in his _West-östliches Divan_, celebrated what is quiet and contemplative in the Oriental view of life. Obermann sang of the land of legend, of buried treasures, of Aladdin and the wonderful lamp; but for Byron (who was practically the first to introduce into Europe the perfume and colour of the East), for Hugo, and for Delacroix, it was the distant, bright-hued, barbaric land of the rising sun, the land of sanguinary warfare and overthrow, the home of light and colour. Here it was that the French Romanticists found the world that realised their dreams of colour. The East became for them what Rome had been for the Classical school. From the feeble and misty sun of Paris, and from the grey skies of the Boulevard des Italiens, they turned to Africa. His enthusiasm for this newly discovered world resounds, full and clear, in Delacroix's letters. "Were I to leave the land in which I have found them," he wrote, during his stay in Morocco, of the men whom he saw about him there, "they would seem to me like trees torn up by the roots. I should forget the impressions I have received, and should be able only in an incomplete and frigid manner to reproduce the sublime and fascinating life which fills the streets here, and attracts one by the beauty of its appearance. Think, my friend, what it means to a painter to see lying in the sunshine, wandering about the streets and offering shoes for sale, men who have the appearance of ancient consuls, of the reincarnated spirits of Cato and Brutus, who lack not even that proud, discontented look which those lords of the world must have had. They possess nothing save a blanket in which they walk, sleep, and are buried, and yet they look as dignified as Cicero in his curule chair. What truth, what nobility in these figures! There is nothing more beautiful in the antique. And all in white, as with Roman senators or at the Greek Panathenæa."