"La lune blanche Luit dans les bois; De chaque branche Part une voix. L'étang reflète, Profond miroir, La silhouette Du saule noir Où le vent pleure: Rêvons c'est l'heure. Un vaste et tendre Apaisement Semble descendre Du firmament Que l'astre irise: C'est l'heure exquise." [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BESNARD. PORTRAIT OF MLLES. D.] Sometimes the humour of the landscape is associated with the memory of kindred feelings which passages in the Bible or in old legends have awakened in him. In such cases he creates the biblical or mythological pictures which have principally occupied him in recent years. Grey-green dusk rests upon the earth; the shadows of evening drive away the last rays of the sun. A mother with her child is sitting upon a bundle of straw in front of a thatched cottage with a ladder leaning against its roof, and a poverty-stricken yard bordered by an old paling, while a man in a brown mantle stands beside her, leaning upon a stick: this picture is "The Birth of Christ." Two solitary people, a man and a woman, are walking through a soft, undulating country. The sun is sinking. No house will give the weary wanderers shelter in the night, but the shade of evening, which is gradually descending, envelops them with its melancholy peace: this is "The Flight into Egypt." An arid waste of sand, with a meagre bush rising here and there, and the parching summer sun brooding sultry overhead, forms the landscape of the picture "Hagar and Ishmael." Or the fortifications of a mediæval town are represented. Night is drawing on, watch-fires are burning, brawny figures stand at the anvil fashioning weapons, and the sentinels pace gravely along the moat. The besieged town is Bethulia, and the woman who issues with a wild glance from the town gateway is Judith, going forth followed by her handmaid to slay Holofernes. Through such works Cazin has become the creator of the landscape of religious sentiment, which has since occupied so much space in French and German painting. The costume belongs to no time in particular, though it is almost more appropriate to the present than to bygone ages; but something so biblical, so patriarchal, such a remote and mystical poetry is expressed in the great lines of the landscape that the figures seem like visions from a far-off past.