Daubigny, possibly, has not the great and free creative power of the older artists, their magnificent simplicity in treating objects: the feminine element, the susceptibility to natural beauty, preponderates in him, and not the virile, creative power of embodiment, which at once discovers in itself a telling force of expression for the image received from nature. He seeks after no poetic emotions, like Dupré; he has not the profound, penetrative eye for nature, like Rousseau; in his charm and amiability he approaches Corot, except that mythological beings are no longer at home in his landscapes. They would take no pleasure in this odour of damp grass, the smell of the cow-byres, and the dilapidated old skiffs which rock, in Daubigny's pictures, fastened to a swampy bank. Corot, light, delicate, and simple as a boy, sitting on a school-bench all his life, is always veiled and mysterious. Daubigny, heavier and technically better equipped, has more power and less grace; he dreams less and paints more. Corot made the apotheosis of nature: his silvery grey clouds bore him to the Elysian fields, where nothing had the heaviness of earth and everything melted in poetic vapour. Daubigny, borne by no wings of Icarus, seems like Antæus beside him; he is bodily wedded to the earth. Dupré made the earth a mirror of the tears and passions of men. Corot surprised her before the peasant is up of a morning, in the hours when she belongs altogether to the nymphs and the fairies. In Daubigny the earth has once more become the possession of human beings. It is not often that figures move in his pictures. Even Rousseau more often finds a place in his landscapes for the rustic, but nature in him is hard, unapproachable, and deliberately indifferent to man. She looks down upon him austerely, closing and hardening her heart against him. In Daubigny nature is familiar with man, stands near him, and is kindly and serviceable. The skiffs rocking at the river's brink betray that fishers are in the neighbourhood; even when they are empty his little houses suggest that their inhabitants are not far off, that they are but at work in the field and may come back at any moment. In Rousseau man is merely an atom of the infinite; here he is the lord of creation. Rousseau makes an effect which is simple and powerful, Dupré one which is impassioned and striking, Corot is divine, Diaz charming, and Daubigny idyllic, intimate, and familiar. He closed a period and enjoyed the fruits of what the others had called into being. One does not admire him--one loves him.