Art Out-of-Doors 



world is enough for him, as a thing to enjoy- 

 no less than as a thing to paint. Delacroix 



was not a landscape-painter, so we cannot 

 suspect him of professional bias ; and there 

 has never been a painter whom we could 

 more easily credit with an inborn love for 

 striking and even spectaculai' kinds of beauty. 

 But fine scenery was not essential to his en- 

 joyment of Nature. ^^The poorest little 

 alley/' he wrote one day from a shabby 

 suburb of Paris. with its straight little leaf- 

 less saphngs, in a dull and flat horizon, can 

 say as much to the imagination as the most 

 bepraised of sites. This tiny cotyledon 

 piercing the earth, this violet shedding its 

 first whirt of perfume, are enchanting. I 

 love such things as much as the pines of 

 Italy." 



This is the voice of the true lover of 

 Nature, and like it was Corot's voice, con- 

 stantly praising, not the grandeurs which he 

 had seen on his travels, but the tender, 

 gentle, subtile beauties around his home at 

 Ville d'Avray. and. more than anything 

 else, the humblest of them all — ''my leaves 

 and my little birds." If one is born to love 

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