The rising breezes are sighing through the foliage, and the birds, choristers of the flowers, are singing their vesper-songs—calling, some of them, plaintively for their lost mates.
Bing! A star pricks its portrait in the pond.
All around now is darkness and gloom—the crickets have taken up the song where the birds left off.
The little lake is sparkling, a regular ant-heap of twinkling stars.
Reflected things are best—the waters are only to reflect the sky—
Nature's looking-glass.
The sun has gone to rest; the day is done. But the Sun of Art has arisen, and my picture is complete.
Let us go home.
The Barbizon School—which, by the way, was never a school, and if it exists now is not at Barbizon—was made up of five men: Corot, Millet, Rousseau, Diaz and Daubigny.
Corot saw it first—this straggling little village of Barbizon, nestling there at the foot of the Forest of Fontainebleau, thirty- five miles southeast of Paris. This was about the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty. There was no market then for Corot's wares, and the artist would have doubted the sanity of any one who might have wanted to buy. His income was one dollar a day—and this was enough. If he wanted to go anywhere, he walked; and so he walked into Barbizon one day, his pack on his back, and found there a little inn, so quaint and simple that he stayed two days.
The landlord quite liked the big, jolly stranger. Hanging upon his painting outfit was a mandolin, a harmonica, a guitar and two or three other small musical instruments of nondescript pedigree. The painter made music for the village, and on invitation painted a sketch on the tavern-wall to pay for his board. And this sketch is there even to this day, and is as plain to be seen as the splash of ink on the wall at Eisenach where Martin Luther threw the ink-bottle at the devil.