Corot also took the brilliant opportunity of the hours of sleep. In some
landscapes of his early manner he has the very light of dreams, and it
was surely because he went abroad at the time when sleep and dreams
claimed his eyes that he was able to see so spiritual an illumination.
Summer is precious for a painter, chiefly because in summer so many of
the hours of sleep are also hours of light. He carries the mood of man's
night out into the sunshine--Corot did so--and lives the life of night,
in all its genius, in the presence of a risen sun. In the only time when
the heart can dream of light, in the night of visions, with the rhythmic
power of night at its dark noon in his mind, his eyes see the soaring of
the actual sun.

He himself has not yet passed at that hour into the life of day. To that
life belongs many another kind of work, and a sense of other kinds of
beauty; but the summer daybreak was seen by Corot with the extreme
perception of the life of night. Here, at last, is the explanation of
all the memories of dreams recalled by these visionary paintings, done in
earlier years than were those, better known, that are the Corots of all
the world. Every man who knows what it is to dream of landscape meets
with one of these works of Corot's first manner with a cry, not of
welcome only, but of recognition. Here is morning perceived by the
spirit of the hours of sleep.




THE HORIZON


To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than