Even in the twenties Koch's classical heroic landscapes, executed with an ideal sweep of line, were contrasted with castle chapels, ruins, and cloister courts composed in a similarly arbitrary manner. Landscape was no longer to make its appeal to the understanding by lines, as in the work of the Classicists, but to touch the spirit by colour. The various hues of moonlight seemed specially made to awaken sombre emotions. But as yet the technique of painting was too inadequately trained to express this preconceived "mood" through nature itself. To make his intentions clearer, therefore, the painter showed the effect of natural scenery on the figures in his pictures, illustrating the "mood" of the landscape in the "accessories." Lessing's early works represent in art that self-consciously elegiac and melancholy sentimental rendering of a mood introduced into literature by _Sternbald_, in his knights, squires, noble maidens, and other romantic requisites. The melancholy lingers upon rocks savagely piled upon each other, tumble-down chapels and ruined castles, in swamps and sombre woods, in old, decaying trees, half-obliterated paths, and ghostly gravestones; it veils the sky with a dark grey cerement. Amid hills and glens with wayside crosses, mills, and charcoal-burners' huts may be seen lonely wanderers, praying pilgrims, priests hurrying from the cloister to bring the last consolation to the dying, riders who have lost their way, and mercenary soldiers lying dead. His first picture of 1828 revealed a desolate churchyard beneath a dark and lowering heaven, from which a solitary sunbeam bursts forth to illumine a grave-stead. Then followed the castle by the sea standing upon strangely moulded cliffs heaped in confusion; the churchyard in the snow where the nuns in the cloisters are following a dead sister to the grave; the churchyard cloister, likewise in snow, where an old man has dug a fresh grave; the cloister in the light of evening with a priest visiting the sick; the landscape with the weary, grey-headed crusader, riding on a weary horse through a lonely mountain district, probably meant as an illustration to Uhland's ballad _Das Rosennest_-- "Rühe hab ich nie gefunden, Als ein Jahr im finstern Thurm"; and then came the desolate tableland with the robbers' den burnt to ashes, and the landscape with the oak and the shrine of the Virgin, before which a knight and noble lady are making their devotions. As yet all these pictures were an arbitrary _potpourri_ from Walter Scott, Tieck, and Uhland, and their ideal was the Wolf's Glen in the _Freischütz_. [Illustration: FRIEDRICH PRELLER.]