For Italy is Boecklin's home as a landscape painter, and the moods of nature there are more in number than Poussin ever painted. Grave and sad and grandiose is the Roman Campagna, with the ruins of the street of sepulchres, and the grey and black herds of cattle looking mournfully over the brown pastures. Hidden like the Sleeping Beauty lie the Roman villas in his pictures, in their sad combination of splendour and decay, of life and death, of youth and age. Behind weather-beaten grotto-wells and dark green nooks of yew, white busts and statues gleam like phantoms. From lofty terraces the water in decaying aqueducts trickles down with a monotonous murmur into still pools, where bracken and withered shrubs overgrown with ivy are reflected. Huge cypresses of the growth of centuries stand gravely in the air, tossing their heads mournfully when the wind blows. Then at a bound we are at Tivoli, and the whole scenery is changed. Great fantastic rocks rise straight into the air, luxuriantly mantled by ivy and parasitic growths; trees and shrubs take root in the clefts; the floods of the Anio plunge headforemost into the depths with a roar of sound, like a legion of demons thunder-stricken by some higher power. Then comes Naples, with its glory of flowers and its moods of evening glowing in deep ruby. Blue creepers twine round the balustrades of castles; hedges of monthly roses veil the roads, and oranges grow large amid the dark foliage. Farther away he paints the Homeric world of Sicily, with its crags caressed or storm-beaten by the wave, its blue grottoes, and its deep glowing splendours of changing colour. Or he represents the inland landscape of Florence with its soft graceful lines of hill, its fields and flowers, buds and blossoms, and its numbers of white dreaming villas hidden amid rosy oleanders and standing against the blue sky with a brightness almost dazzling. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ BOECKLIN. A VILLA BY THE SEA.] [Illustration: _Albert, Munich._ BOECKLIN. A ROCKY CHASM.]