The next step which Romanticism had to take was to discover such primæval woodland scenes in actual nature, and as Italian landscape seems, as it were, to have been made for Claude, nature, as she is in Germany, makes a peculiar appeal to this romantic temperament. In certain parts of Saxon Switzerland the rocks look as if giants of the prime had played ball with them or piled them one on top of the other in sport. Lessing found in 1832 a landscape corresponding to the romantic ideal of nature in the Eifel district, whither he had been induced to go by a book by Nöggerath, _Das Gebirge im Rheinland und Westfalen nach Mineralogischem und Chemischem Bezuge_. Up to that time he had only known the romantic ideal of nature through Scott, Tieck, and Uhland, just as the Classicists had taken their ideal from Homer, Theocritus, and Virgil: in the Eifel district it came before him in tangible form. Flat, swampy tracts of shrub and spruce alternated with dark woods, where gigantic firs, weird pines, and primæval oaks raised their branches to the sky. At the same time he beheld the rude and lonely sublimity of nature in union with a humanity which was as yet uncultivated, and for that reason all the simpler and the healthier, judged by the Romanticist's distaste for civilisation. Defiant cones of rock and huge masses of mountain wildly piled upon each other overlooked valleys in which a stalwart race of peasants passed their days in patriarchal simplicity. Here, for the first time, a sense for actual landscape was developed in him; hitherto it had been alloyed by a taste for knights, robbers, and monks. "Oh, had I been born in the seventeenth century," he wrote, "I would have wandered after the Thirty Years' War throughout Germany, plundered, ruined, and run wild as she then was." Hitherto only "composed" Italian landscapes had been painted, the soil of home ostensibly offering no _sujets_, or, in other words, not suiting those tendencies which subordinated everything to style: so Lessing was now the first painter of German landscape. His "Eifel Landscape" in the Berlin National Gallery, which was followed by a series of such pictures, introduces the first period of German landscape painting. The forms of the ground and of the rough sides of rock are rendered sharply and decisively, from geological knowledge. On principle he became an opponent of all artistic influence derived from Italy, and located himself in the Eifel district. The landscapes which he painted there are founded on immediate studies of nature, and are sustained by large and earnest insight. He draws the picture of this quarter in strong and simple lines: the sadness of the heath and the dark mist, the dull breath of which rises from swampy moorland. Still he painted only scenes in which nature had taken the trouble to be fantastic. The eye of the painter did not see her bright side, approaching her only when she looked gloomy or was in angry humour. Either he veils the sky with vast