[Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ _Photo, Mansell._ WATTEAU. THE MUSIC PARTY.] But still more modern is the effect, when instead of painting Elysian landscapes with happy inhabitants, he drew mere bits of rural nature, poor solitary regions in the neighbourhood of big towns, where bricklayers are working on the scaffolding of some house, or peasants are riding with their horses over some stony byway. Out of a number of spirited drawings, this side of his perception in landscape is especially notable in the picture in the New Palace at Potsdam, in the left background of which a small stream flows past a farmhouse, whilst in front a peasant is laboriously dragging a two-wheeled cart over the rough ground. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ _Photo, Mansell._ WATTEAU. THE RETURN FROM THE CHASE.] It is interesting to observe, at that time, after Watteau and his English predecessors, the widespread growth of this new feeling for nature. Thomson was followed by Rousseau, who, on his lonely wanderings, looked with moved eyes at "the gold of the corn crop, the purple of the heather, the majesty of the trees, and the wonderful variety of flowers and grasses." He delighted in the blossoming of spring, the copses and rivulets, the song of birds, shady woods, and the landscapes of autumn, where the reapers and vine-dressers were working. He is the author of that lively feeling for nature that henceforth was aroused through the whole of Europe. A breath of pure mountain air, a wholesome draught of fresh water from Lake Leman, were brought suddenly into the sultry atmosphere of salons, and filled people's hearts with a new and charming sensation when Rousseau's works appeared. It was over with all efforts of "stylists" as soon as Rousseau declared that everything was good just as it came out of the lap of the universal mother, nature. [Illustration: WATTEAU. FÊTE CHAMPÈTRE.] Goethe, the pupil of Rousseau, presages, in his whole conception of nature, something of the manifestation of the school of Fontainebleau. He had something of Daubigny when, as Werther, he lies on the bank of the stream and looks down thoughtfully at the worms and small insects. He makes one think of Dupré or Corot when he says: "As nature declines upon autumn, within me and around me it grows autumn"; or, "I could not now draw so much as a stroke, and I have never been a greater painter than at the present moment"; or, "Never have I been happier, nor has my perception of nature, down to the pebble or the grass beneath me, been fuller and more intimate. Yet,--I know not how I can express myself, everything swims and oscillates before my soul, so that I can seize no outline. A great, shadowy whole waves before my soul, my perception grows indistinct before it, even as my eyes do." [Illustration: GESSNER. LANDSCAPE (ETCHING).]