"What is beautiful?--A landscape with upright trees, fair vistas, atmosphere of azure blue, ornamental fountains, stately palaces in a learned architectural style, with well-built men and women, and well-fed cows and sheep. What is ugly?--Ill-formed trees with aged, crooked, and cloven stems, uneven and earthless ground, sharp-cut hills and mountains which are too high, rude or dilapidated buildings, with their ruins lying strewn in heaps, a sky with heavy clouds, stagnant water, lean cattle in the field, and ungraceful wayfarers." In these words Gérard de Lairesse, the ancestor of Classicism, defined his ideal of landscape, and in the last clause, where he speaks of ugliness, he prophetically indicated the landscape ideal of the Romanticists, as this is given for the first time in literature in Tieck's _Sternbald_. For the young knight in _Sternbald_ who desires to become a painter exclaims with enthusiasm: "Then would I depict lonely and terrible regions, rotting and broken bridges, between two rough cliffs facing a precipice, through which the forest stream forces its foaming course, lost travellers whose garments flutter in the moist wind, the dreaded figures of robbers ascending from the gully, waggons fallen upon and plundered, and battle against the travellers." Which is all exactly the opposite to what Lairesse demanded from the landscapist. Alexander Humboldt has shown that the men of antiquity only found beauty in nature so far as she was kindly, smiling, and useful to them. But to the Romanticists nature was uncomely where she was the servant of civilisation, and beautiful only in tameless and awe-inspiring savageness. The light, therefore, was never to be that of simple day, but the gloom of night and of the mountain glens. Such phenomena are neither to be seen in Berlin nor in Breslau, and to be a Romanticist was to love the opposite of all that one sees around one. Tieck, who lived in the cold daylight of Berlin with its modern North German rationalism, has therefore--and not by chance--first felt the yearning for moonlight landscapes of primæval forest; _Lessing_, from Breslau, was the first to give it pictorial expression. [Illustration: K. ROTTMANN. LAKE KOPAÏS.]