For a young man this would be a very dangerous method. For Corot it was the only one which allowed him to remain Corot, because in this way no unnecessary detail disturbed the pure, poetic reverie. He had spent his whole life in a dallying courtship with nature, ever renewed. As a child he looked down from his attic window upon the wavering mists of the Seine; as a schoolboy in Rouen he wandered lost in his own fancies along the borders of the great river; when he had grown older he went every year with his sister to a little country-house in Ville d'Avray, which his father had bought for him in 1817. Here he stood at the open window, in the depth of the night, when every one was asleep, absorbed in looking at the sky and listening to the plash of waters and the rustling of leaves. Here he stayed quite alone. No sound disturbed his reveries, and unconsciously he drank in the soft, moist air and the delicate vapour rising from the neighbouring river. Everything was harmoniously reflected in his quick and eager spirit, and his eyes beheld the individual trait of nature floating in the universal life. He began not merely to see nature, but to feel her presence, like that of a beloved woman, to receive her very breath and to hear the beating of her heart. One knows the marvellous letter in which he describes the day of a landscape painter to Jules Dupré: "_On se lève de bonne heure, à trois heures du matin, avant le soleil; on va s'asseoir au pied d'un arbre, on regarde et on attend. On ne voit pas grand'chose d'abord. La nature ressemble à une toile blanchâtre où s'esquissent à peine les profils de quelques masses: tout est embaumé, tout frisonne au souffle fraîchi de l'aube. Bing! le soleil s'éclaircit ... le soleil n'a pas encore déchiré la gaze derrière laquelle se cachent la prairie, le vallon, les collines de l'horizon.... Les vapeurs nocturnes rampent encore commes des flocons argentés sur les herbes d'un vert transi. Bing!... Bing!... un premier rayon de soleil ... un second rayon de soleil.... Les petites fleurettes semblent s'éveiller joyeuses.... Elles out toutes leur goutte de rosée qui tremble ... les feuilles frileuses s'agitent au souffle du matin ... dans la feuillée, les oiseaux invisibles chantent.... Il semble que ce sont les fleurs qui font la prière. Les Amours à ailes de papillons s'ébattent sur la prairie et font onduler les hautes herbes.... On ne voit rien ... tout y est. Le paysage est tout entier derrière la gaze transparente du brouillard, qui, au reste ... monte ... monte ... aspiré par le soleil ... et laisse, en se levant, voir la rivière lamée d'argent, les prés, les arbres, les maisonettes, le lointain fuyant.... On distingue enfin tout ce que l'on divinait d'abord._" [Illustration: _Baschet._ DUPRÉ. THE OLD OAK.]