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 spectacular 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 saplings, 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 whiff 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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