ITALIAN GARDENS OF THE RENAISSANCE 
in Costa’s own transcripts of Nature. The painter’s 
own emotion and delight in the scene, his intimate 
sympathy with the subject, is always present in his 
work and becomes part of the picture. In such 
little paintings as Lord Leighton’s “ Winter Evening in 
the Woods of Fajola,” with the sheep feeding under the 
bare trees and the yellow light breaking over the low 
wooded hills, or in that other study of “ Autumn in the 
Forests of Albano,” he seems to summarise the peculiar 
scenery of the Alban hills, and makes us feel the innate 
spirit of the place and hour—“ the intense tranquillity 
of silent hills and more than silent sky.” Costa was, 
in fact, as Mr. Henley was fond of saying, a thorough 
Wordsworthian.” Nature had for him the same 
subtle attraction that it had for poets such as Shelley 
and Wordsworth, and deep at the root of all his 
renderings of her changeful moods we feel the same 
dim glimmerings of the truth that lies at the heart 
of things, the same mysterious sense of a Love which 
tc impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought. 
These are some of the different elements that help 
to make up the rare and indefinable charm of Costa s 
work. The range of his art, of course, is narrow. 
He confines himself almost entirely to one style of 
subject, and returns by preference to the same 
subjects. But within these limitations his art is 
very perfect and exquisite. “ There is, however,” as 
