this remark

able painting of melting snow and of

gnarled, bare branches, where a flock of blackbirds, cawing in the joyousness of

the young spring, build their nests, there is a breath of soft

poetry. One

scents in it the

faint, sweet perfume of the sod quickening beneath pools of melting snow; here for

that patience in humility which is so touching in the Russian peasant nature of today. The rich gold of the summer harvest is spilled over all the land. Why is its

the first time we have the Russian landscape mood, that poetic and melodic undertone which led to the symphonized "poetry in painting" of Konstantin Koróvin, Sieróv, and Levitán.

The Russian summer holds a strange appeal. One of the early painters of the nineteenth century, Venetsiánov, already struck the note of the modern painters in his "Summer." On a terrace sits a peasant woman. She is clad in a white rubáshka, or blouse, and a crimson skirt. A sickle lies on the terrace by her side. Dark and aquiline, of an almost Dantesque austerity, her profile stands out against the rippling golden sea of grain below, which stretches to the heat-dimmed horizon. There is sadness here, brooding,

effect on the soul of the onlooker so dif

ferent in Russia from that received in any other land? A11 harvests, surely, are alike. I may

not know, as the Russians say; perhaps it is the underlying consciousness of all the sorrow and despair that lie concealed in Russia behind this fair and smiling land

"Corn-fields." No human form is here. Blackly against the brightness of the vast and empty horizon is stamped in clearrelief the heavy foliage of the whispering trees. A road winds through the field and curves around behind the somber line of sentry trees. Beauty, silence, loneliness are everywhere.

Often in summer, while walking, clad in red rubáshka and heavy, half-leg boots, and with pilgrim staff in hand, through some remote country district, I have caught from the road, like the glimmer and gleam of the sea, the silvery fire of the white birches. In no country have I seen such birch-groves, such dazzlingly white resplendencies, as I have seen in Russia.

Kuindzhí has painted one, bright, hot sunlight and deep, velvety shadow, a quiet brook in the center, a dark background of trees, a gleaming silver of slender birches facing the sunlit vista. This is a painting before which the lover of the Russian landscape may stand and dream. Dreams -they are the stuff of which Russian life is made, and the summer woods are the palace of their abode.

No painter of modern times has depicted the mood of loneliness and solitude amid the summer woods like the Russian artist Vasnetsóv. Vasnetsov is a real mystic; the ancient mood of Byzantium and Novgorod is in him still, as his religious paintings in the Russian galleries amply demonstrate. All his work is stamped by that ecstacy of sorrow which his wellknown painting "Alenushka," or "Little Helen," portrays. The woodland background, the little glade, the lonely maiden crouching barefoot by the quiet pool, the sorrow of the bowed head and melancholy gaze, produce an indescribable effect. The forest glade, where the bruised soul may creep and hide itself, is a favorite theme

of modern Russian painters. Their love of the woods is deep and brooding, like the woods themselves. But their love of the woods is not only the love of sadness, the quest of balm of Gilead to life-bruised hearts; but also the temple where pure beauty dwells. In this mood came Levitán to the Russian woods-Levitán, the greatest nature-painter of the modern school, whose soul was so sensitive that it was said of him that he could hear by senses subtler than the brain the very grasses grow. Levitán, the mystic hedonist, to whom art was compounded both of joy and of despair, for that he loved her so and ne'er could do her the honor that was due; Levitán, who lurked, like some god half human, half divine, in the forest leaves, and spied on Beauty as she walked in splendor when the sunset came and cast its crimson glory across the boles of tall, slim, priestly trees; ecstatic, as in some strange Preraphaelitic dream they stand as if awaiting this investiture of magnificent stoles to celebrate the sacraments over the bier of swiftly-dying day.

Beautiful as Russian painting is in all