In Boecklin all this is reversed. Landscape painter he is in his very essence, and he is, moreover, the greatest landscape painter of the nineteenth century, at whose side even the Fontainebleau group seem one-sided specialists. Every one of the latter had a peculiar type of landscape, and a special hour in the day which appealed to his feelings more distinctly than any other. One loved spring and dewy morning, another the clear, cold day, another the threatening majesty of the storm, the flashing effects of sportive sunbeams, or the evening after sunset, when colours fade from view. But Boecklin is as inexhaustible as infinite nature herself. In one place he celebrates the festival of spring with its burden of beauty: it is ushered in by snowdrops, and greeted with joy by the veined cups of the crocus; yellow primroses and blue violets merrily nod their heads, and a hundred tiny mountain streams leap precipitately into the valley to announce the coming of spring. In another, nature shines and blooms and chimes, and breathes her balm in all the colours of summer. Tulips freaked with purple rise at the side of paths; flowers in rows of blue, white, and yellow--hyacinths, daisies, gentians, anemones, and snapdragon--fill the sward in hordes; and down in the valley blow the narcissus in dazzling myriads, loading the air with an overpowering perfume. But, beside such lovely idylls, he has painted with puissant sublimity as many complaining elegies and tempestuous tragedies. Here, the sombre autumnal landscapes, with their tall black cypresses, are lashed by the rain and the howling storm. There, lonely islands or grave, half-ruined towers, tangled with creepers, rise dreamily from a lake, mournfully hearkening to the repining murmur of the waves; and there, in the midst of a narrow rocky glen, a rotten bridge hangs over a fearful abyss. Or a raging storm, beneath the might of which the forests bow, blusters round a wild mountain land which rises from a blue-black lake. Boecklin has painted everything: the graceful and heroic, the solitude and the waste, the solemnly sublime and the darkly tragic, passionate agitation and demoniacal fancy, the strife of foaming waves and the eternal rest of rigid masses of rock, the wild uproar of the sky and the still peace of flowery fields. The compass of his moods is as much greater than that of the French Classicists as Italy is greater than Fontainebleau.