travellers instructed the laity that the deep blue snow of the picture was no exaggeration, but a phenomenon of the mountain world which had been correctly reproduced. In all these cases there can be no possible doubt about geographical position, but there is seldom any need to make inquiries after the artist. The interest which they excite is purely of a topographical order; otherwise they bear the stamp of ordinary prose, of the aridity and unattractiveness which always creeps in as a consequence of pure objectivity. Works of the second description, which depict exotic regions, striking by the strangeness of various phenomena of light and the splendour and glow of colour, are generally irritating by their professional effort to display "mood." The old masters revealed "mood" without intending to do so, because they approached nature piously and with a wealth of feeling. The new masters obtain a purely external effect, because they strain after a "mood" in their painting without feeling it; and though art does not exclude the choice of exotic subjects, it is not healthy when a tendency of this sort becomes universal. Really superior art will, from principle, never seek the charm of what is strange and distant, since it possesses the magical gift of bestowing the deepest interest on what lies nearest to it. In addition to this, such effects are as hard to seize as the moment of most intense excitement in the historical picture. As an historical painter Delacroix could render it, and Turner as a landscape painter, but geniuses like Delacroix and Turner are not born every day. As these phenomena were painted at the time in Germany, the right "mood" was not excited by them, but merely a frigid curiosity. Almost all landscapes of these years create an effect merely through their subject; they are entertaining, astonishing, instructive, but the poetry of nature has not yet been aroused. It could only reveal itself when the preponderance of interest in mere subject was no longer allowed. As the figure painters at last disdained through narrative and "points" to win the applause of those who had no sensitiveness for art, so the landscape painters were obliged to cease from giving geographical instruction by the representation of nature as beloved by tourists, and to give up forcing a "mood" in their pictures by a subterfuge. The necessary degree of artistic absorption could only go hand in hand with a revolt against purely objective interest of motive, and with a strenuous effort at the representation of familiar nature in the intimate charm of its moods of light and atmosphere. It was necessary for refinement of taste to follow on the expression of subject-matter; and this impulse had to bring artists back to the path struck by Dahl, Morgenstern, and Gurlitt. To unite the simple, moving, and tender observation of those older artists with richer and more complex methods of expression was the task given to