To this resigned and mournful expression must be added the uncomfortable motionlessness of his figures. They do not speak, and do not laugh, and do not cry; they know no passions and sorrows which express themselves by the straining of the limbs. Everything bears the impress of sublime peace, of that same peace by which the works of Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, and Burne-Jones are to be distinguished from the ecstatic and sentimental tirades of the Romanticists. In Feuerbach's works this is the stamp of his own nature. The antique beauty becomes shrouded in a mysterious veil; and life is illuminated as by a mournful light, which rests over bygone worlds. What heart-rending keenness is often in the effect of the melancholy tinge of these subdued bluish tones! That colour is the genuine expression of the temperament reveals itself clearly enough in Feuerbach. When he began his career, his head full of ideals and his heart full of hopes, his pictures exulted in a Venetian splendour, in full and luxuriant golden harmonies; as "joy after joy was shipwrecked in the stream of time" they became leaden, sullen, and corpse-like. As Frans Hals in his last days, when his fellow-creatures allowed him only the bare necessities of life, accorded to the figures in his pictures only so much colour as would give them the appearance of living human beings; as Rembrandt's magical golden tone changed in the sad days of his bankruptcy into a sullen, monotonous brown, so a deep sadness broods over the pictures of Feuerbach,--something that savours of memory and remorse, the mournful atmosphere and dark mood of evening which the bat loves. Even as a colourist he has the melancholy lassitude of the end of the century.