Later his works acquire breadth; details are treated more freely and are less obtrusive; the feeling for ensemble is more complete. And corresponding with this ampler motive is a clearer eye for the local colors, a richer and fuller tonality. Then, by degrees, the true Ruisdael discovers himself. As we know him in the finest works of the Amsterdam period, his genius is declared in the amplitude of his conception of nature. We are in the presence of one who has comprehended the vastness of its suggestion, and entered into it, merging therein the pettiness of personality. At these great moments it would be hard to mention a landscape-painter whose outlook is larger, freer, and more impersonal than Ruisdael’s, whose attitude is more truly epic; usually with an ample expression of serene benignity, but, even when there is stir of conflict, with an all-embracing vision that merges the accidental in the universal. In the attainment of this magnificent composure it is the skies that play the greatest part. They occupy a large, often the larger, portion of the canvas. They are not only expanses of light, contrasted with the darker tones of the ground, as in the case of most Holland landscapes, but are pervaded with vibrating atmosphere that, while it penetrates to the front, seems to communicate with endless space. To this element of universal suggestion is added the stimulus of the poised or drifting cloud-forms. They are not merely shapes of vapor, but have bulk and weight and carrying power. They are to the fluid mass of the sky what the wave is to the ocean: a manifestation of its boundless energies. While to him the ground and its forms of tree and rock or dune are symbols of stability and static force, the sky is symbol of dynamic energy unbounded. It is because Ruisdael thus felt and could interpret the symbolism of nature that his finest landscapes and marines create and maintain so profound an impression. Among the pictures prior to 1655 is _View of Haarlem from the Hill of Overveen_, a subject by which Ruisdael seems to have trained and disciplined himself, for he often repeated it. There are said to be twenty examples, some of which are in the galleries of The Hague and Berlin, in the Rijks Museum, and used to be included in the Holford and Kann collections. From the elevation in the foreground one looks down and across a stretch of level country, broken up with trees and houses and a field where strips of linen are bleaching, to the city, over which rises the mass of the Groote Kerk, St. Bavon. But two thirds of the canvas is given to the sky. The picture presents an elaborate study in the art of ground-and sky-construction, in the difficult differentiation of the planes of a level country, and in building the sky’s volume and depth. Already there are distance and spaciousness, but as yet little expression, while, in the case of the Berlin example especially, the technique is still a trifle hard and dry.