From this mood sprang modern landscape painting with its delicate reserve in subject, and its vigorously heightened love of nature. Up to the middle of the century nature was too commonplace and ordinary for the Germans; and it was therefore hard for them to establish a spiritual relationship with her. Landscape painting recognised its function in appealing to the understanding by the execution of points of geographical interest, or exciting a frigid curiosity by brilliant fireworks. But these children of the city, who with a heartfelt sympathy counted the budding and falling leaves of a single tree descried from their little attic window; these dreamers, who in their imagination constructed beautiful landscapes from the moss-crusted gutters of the roof and the chimneys and chimney smoke, were sufficiently schooled, when they came into the country, to feel the breath of the great mother of all, even where it was but faintly exhaled. Where a man's heart is full he does not think about geographical information, and no roll of tom-toms is needed to attract the attention of those whose eyes are opened. Their spirit was sensitive, and their imagination sufficiently alert to catch with ecstasy, even from the most delicate and reserved notes, the harmony of that heavenly concert which nature executes on all its earthly instruments, at every moment and in all places. [Illustration: ROUSSEAU. MORNING.] [Illustration: ROUSSEAU. LANDSCAPE, MORNING EFFECT.] Thus they had none of them any further need for extensive pilgrimage; to seek impulse for work they had not far to go. Croissy, Bougival, Saint-Cloud, and Marly were their Arcadia. Their farthest journeys were to the banks of the Oise, the woods of L'Isle Adam, Auvergne, Normandy, and Brittany. But they cared most of all to stay in the forest of Fontainebleau, which--by one of those curious chances that so often recur in history--played for a second time a highly important part in the development of French art. A hundred years before, it was the brilliant centre of the French Renaissance, the resort of those Italian artists who found in the palace there a second Vatican, and in Francis I another Leo X. In the nineteenth century, too, the Renaissance of French painting was achieved in Fontainebleau, only it had nothing to do with a school of mannered figure painters, but with a group of the most delicate landscape artists. From a sense of one's duty to art one studies in the palace the elegant goddesses of Primaticcio, the laughing bacchantes of Cellini, and all the golden, festal splendour of the Cinquecento; but the heart is not touched till one stands outside in the forest on the soil where Rousseau and Corot and Millet and Diaz painted. How much may be felt and thought when one saunters of a dreamy evening, lost in one's own meditations, across the heath of the _plateau de la Belle Croix_ and through the arching oaks of _Bas Bréau_ to Barbizon,