"Mon coeur est en repos, mon âme est en silence, Le bruit lointain du monde expire en arrivant, Comme un son éloigné qu'affaiblit la distance, À l'oreille incertaine apporté par le vent. J'ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie; Je viens chercher vivant le calme du Léthé: Beaux lieux, soyez pour moi ces bords où l'on oublie; L'oubli seul désormais est ma félicité. D'ici je vois la vie, à travers un nuage, S'évanouir pour moi dans l'ombre du passé... L'amitié me trahit, la pitié m'abandonne, Et, seul, je descends le sentier de tombeaux. Mais la nature est là qui t'invite et qui t'aime; Plonge-toi dans son sein qu'elle t'ouvre toujours; Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même, Est le même soleil se lève sur tes jours." [Illustration: _Levy et ses Fils, photo._ PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. SUMMER.] It was not long before the doctrine of the two souls in _Faust_ was exemplified in Germany also: from the fertile manure of Naturalism there sprang the blue flower of a new Romanticism. In Germany there had once lived Albrecht Dürer, the greatest and most profound painter-poet of all time; and there, too, even in an unpropitious age that genial visionary Moritz Schwind succeeded in flourishing. When the period of eclectic imitation had been overcome by Naturalism, was it not fitting that artists should once more attempt to embody the world of dreams beside that of actual existence, and beside tangible reality to give shape to the unearthly foreboding which fills the human heart with the visions and the cravings of fancy? In that age of hope arose the cult of _Boecklin_, and Germany began to honour in him who had been so long blasphemed the founder of a new and ardently desired art. Burne-Jones, Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Arnold Boecklin make up the four-leaved clover of modern Idealism. To future generations they will bear witness to the sentiment of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century. All four are more or less of the same age; they all four began their work in the beginning of the fifties; and they were all different from their contemporaries and from those who had gone before them. They embodied the spirit of the future. Boecklin had gone through a process of change as little as the others. His spirit was so rich that it comprised a century in itself, and leads us now towards the century to come. He was the contemporary of Schwind, he is our own contemporary, and he will be the contemporary of those who come after us. And it were as impossible to derive his art from that of any previous movement as to explain how he, our greatest visionary, came to be born in Basle, the most prosaic town in Europe. [Illustration: _Levy et ses Fils, photo._ PUVIS DE CHAVANNES. AUTUMN.]