dark tempest blusters, like a wild host, hurrying and sweeping forward in the gloom, tearing and scattering everything in its path, whirling leaves from the slender trees. Clouds big with rain hasten across the horizon as if on a forced march. The whole landscape seems to partake in the flight; the brushwood seems to bow its head like a traveller. In the background a few figures are recognisable: people overtaken by the storm at their work; horses with their manes flying in the wind; and a rider seeking refuge for himself and his beast. A stretch of sluggish water ruffles its waves as though it were frowning. Everything is alive and quaking in this majestic solitude, and in the mingled play of confused lights, hurrying clouds, fluttering branches, and trembling grass. [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ DAUBIGNY. ON THE OISE.] [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ DAUBIGNY. SHEPHERD AND SHEPHERDESS.] "Pasture-land in the Limousin" had the same overpowering energy; it was an admirable picture in 1835, and it is admirable still. The fine old trees stand like huge pillars; the grass, drenched with rain, is of an intense green; nature seems to shudder as if in a fever. And through his whole life Dupré was possessed by the lyrical fever of Romanticism. As the last champion of Romanticism he bore the banner of the proud generation of 1830 through well-nigh two generations, and until his death in 1889 stood on the ground where Paul Huet had first placed French landscape; but Huet attained his pictorial effects by combining and by calculation, while Dupré is always a great, true, and convincing poet. Every evening he was seen in L'Isle Adam, where he settled in 1849, wandering alone across the fields, even in drenching rain. One of his pupils declares that once, when they stood at night on the bridge of the Oise during a storm, Dupré broke into a paroxysm of tears at the magnificent spectacle. He was a fanatic rejoicing in storms, one who watched the tragedies of the heaven with quivering emotion, a passionate spirit consumed by his inward force, and, like his literary counterpart Victor Hugo, he sought beauty of landscape only where it was wild and magnificent. He is the painter of nature vexed and harassed, and of the majestic silence that follows the storm. The theme of his pictures is at one time the whirling torture of the yellow leaves driven before the wind in eddying confusion; tormented and quivering they cleave to the furrows in the mad chase, fall into dykes, and cling against the trunks of trees, to find refuge from their persecutor. At another time he paints how the night wind whistles round an old church and whirls the screaming weather-cock round and round, how it moans and rattles with invisible hand against the doors, forces its way through the windows, and, once shut in its stony prison, seeks a way out again, howling and wailing. He paints sea-pieces in which the sea rages and mutters like