clouds or plunges into the darkness of an untrodden forest. Gnarled trees spread around, their branches stretching out fantastically twisted; the unfettered tumult of the powers of nature, the dull sultry atmosphere before the burst of the storm or its moaning subsidence, are the only moments which he represents. But the whole baggage of unseasonable Romanticism, the nuns and monks, pious knights and sentimental robbers, at first used to embody the mood of nature, were thrown overboard. A quieter and more melancholy though thoroughly manly seriousness, something strong and pithy, lies in the representations of Lessing. The Romanticists had lost all sense of the dumb silent life of nature. They only painted the changing adornment of the earth: heroes and the works of men, palaces, ruins, and classic temples. Nature served merely as a stage scene: the chief interest lay in the persons, the monuments, and the historical ideas associated with them. Even in the older pictures of Lessing the mood was exclusively given by the lyrical accessories. But now it was placed more and more in nature herself, and rings in power like an organ peal, from the cloudy sky, the dim lights, and the swaying tree-tops. For the first time it is really nature that speaks from the canvas, sombre and forceful. In this respect his landscapes show progress. They show the one-sidedness, but also the poetry of the Romantic view of nature. And they are no less of an advance in technique; for in making the discovery that his haunting ideal existed in reality, Lessing first began to study nature apart from preconceived and arbitrary rules of composition, and--learnt to paint. [Illustration: _Albert, Munich._ PRELLER. ULYSSES AND LEUCOTHEA.]