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under the influence of those times of mental depression which occasionally came over him.

Listening in the same fields and meadows in which William Maris finds the symbols that reflect the contented happiness of his own disposition, Mauve hears only the minor chords of earth's music, a tender, beautiful, but sad strain. Like Beethoven's question, Andante. repeated again and again, but always in vain. Symphony.

(for all the different forms of art seek to get beyond the phenomena of the world around us, and to find some solution of the problems that are met at every turn), Mauve's questionings of nature have no reply save the answer of his own sad heart that comes echoing back to him. So truly has Coleridge told us:

"We receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does nature live."

Mauve's pictures give back his own thoughts. They have in them no restlessness, nor discontent with the beautiful world, whose loveliness he well understood and described so charmingly; the pearly grey spring, with its delicate blue sky, as if just newly created,

Fifth

"The

Youth of Nature." Matthew Arnold.

the fuller if less subtle colouring of summer, the rich deep tones of autumn, and the white harmony of winter. Rather do they show that "the tears of things" sadden him, as he sees that man moves through this life like a shadow passing over the ground, and like it disappears and is forgotten, while nature is permanent and enduring. Hear her speaking:

"Will ye scan me and read me and tell

Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast,
My longing, my sadness, my joy?
Will ye claim for your great ones the gift
To have render'd the gleam of my skies,

To have echo'd the moan of my seas,
Utter'd the voice of my hills?

Race after race, man after man,

Have thought that my secret was theirs,

-They are dust, they are changed, they are gone!
I remain."

Mauve is an artist and not a philosopher, and we do not expect any theories of life from him; but he cannot help expressing in his art what he feels, when he looks out on the varied phenomena of the world, and this seems to be the burden of it: the earth is beautiful in itself, but sad in relation to man, for he lives

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PLATE XXXIV. - Crossing the Moor. Anton Mauve.

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