"Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken, Alles eines Gottes Spur ... Diese Höhen füllten Oreaden, Eine Dryas lebt in jedem Baum, Aus dem Urnen lieblicher Najaden Sprang der Ströme Silberschaum. Jener Lorbeer wand sich einst um Hilfe, Tantals Tochter schweigt in diesem Stein, Syrinx Klage tönt aus jenem Schilfe, Philomelas Schmerz aus diesem Hain." The beings which live in Boecklin's pictures owe their origin to a similar action of the spirit. He hears trees, rivers, mountains, and universal nature whisper as with human speech. Every flower, every bush, every flame, the rocks, the waves, and the meadows, dead and without feeling as they are to the ordinary eye, have to his mind a vivid existence of their own; and in the same way the old poet conceived the lightning as a fiery bird and the clouds as the flocks of heaven. The stones have a voice, white walls lengthen like huge phantoms, the bright lights of the houses upon a mountain declivity at night change into the great eyes with which the spirit of the fell glares fixedly down; legions of strange beings circle and whir round in the fantastic region. In his imagination every impression of nature condenses itself into figures that may be seen. As a dragon issues from his lair to terrify travellers in the gloom of a mountain ravine, and as the avenging Furies rise in the waste before a murderer, so in the still brooding noon, when a shrill tone is heard suddenly and without a cause, the Grecian Pan lives once again for Boecklin--Pan, who startles the goat-herd from his dream by an eerie shout, and then whinnies in mockery at the terrified fugitive. The cool, wayward splashing element of water takes shape as a graceful nymph, shrouded in a transparent water-blue veil, leaning upon her welling urn as she listens dreamily to the song of a bird. The fine mists which rise from the fountain-head become embodied as a row of merry children, whose vaporous figures float hazily through the shining clouds of spring. The secret voices that live amid the silence of the wood press round him, and the phantom born of the excited senses becomes a ghostly unicorn advancing with noiseless step, and bearing upon his back a maiden of legendary story dressed in a white garment. In the thundercloud lying over the broad summit of a mountain and abundant in blessing rain he sees the huge body of the giant Prometheus, who brought fire from heaven and lies fettered to the mountain top, spreading over the landscape like a cloud. The form of Death stumbling past cloven trees in rain and tempest, as he rides his pale horse, appears to him in a waste and chill autumnal region, where stands a ruined castle in lurid illumination. A sacred grove, lying in insular seclusion and fringed with venerable old trees that rise straight into the air, rustling as they bend their heads towards each other, is peopled, as at a word of enchantment, with grave priestly figures robed in white, which approach