thin strips of loosened cloud, saturated through and through with a wine-red glow by the splendour of the sun. Or there are spring meadows fragrant with bloom, and hills parched by the sun; rushing trains with their white smoke gleaming in the light; yellow sails scudding over glittering waters; waves shining blue, red, and golden; and burning ships, with shooting tongues of flame leaping upon the masts; and, behind, a jagged rim of the evening glow. Claude Monet has followed light everywhere--in Holland, Normandy, the South of France, Belle-Isle-en-Mer, the villages of the Seine, London, Algiers, Brittany. He became an enthusiast for nature as she is in Norway and Sweden, for French cathedrals rising into the sky, tall and fair, like the peaks of great promontories. He interpreted the surge of towns, the movement of the sea, the majestic solitude of the sky. But he knows too that the artist could pass his life in the same corner of the earth and work for years upon the same objects without the drama of nature played before him ever becoming exhausted. For the light which streams between things is for ever different. So he stood one evening two paces in front of his little house, in the garden, amid a flaming sea of flowers scarlet like poppies. White summer clouds shifted in the sky, and the beams of the setting sun fell upon two stacks, standing solitary in a solitary field. Claude Monet began to paint, and came again the next day, and the day after that, and every day throughout the autumn, and winter, and spring. In a series of fifteen pictures, "The Hay-ricks," he painted--as Hokusai did in his hundred views of the Fuji mountain--the endless variations produced by season, day, and hour upon the eternal countenance of nature. The lonely field is like a glass, catching the effects of atmosphere, the breeze, and the most fleeting light. The stacks gleam softly in the brightness of the beautiful afternoons, stand out sharp and clear against the cold sky of the forenoon, loom like phantoms in the mist of a November evening, or sparkle like glittering jewels beneath the caress of the rising sun. They shine like glowing ovens, absorbed by the light of the autumnal sunset; they are surrounded as by a rosy halo, when the early sun pierces like a wedge through the dense morning mist. They rise distinctly, covered with sparkling, rose-tinged snow, into the cloudless heaven, and cast their pure, blue shadows upon the silent, white, wintry landscape, or stand out in ghostly outlines against the night firmament, mantled with silver by the moonlight. Without moving his easel, Monet has interpreted the silence of winter, and autumn with her sad and splendid feasts of colour--dusk and rain, snow and frost and sun. He heard the voices of evening and the jubilation of morning; he painted the eternal undulation of light upon the same objects, the altered impression which the same particle of nature yields according to the changing light of the hour. He chanted