It was Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) who brought the ideal style to its perfection.  He inspired the very elements with mind and feeling; his valleys, woods, and seas were just a veil through which divinity was visible.  All that was ugly, painful, and confused was purified and transfigured in his hands.  There is no sadness or dejection in his pictures, but a spirit of serene beauty, free from ostentation, far-fetched contrast, or artificial glitter.  Light breezes blow in his splendid trees, golden light quivers through them, drawing the eye to a bright misty horizon; we say with Uhland, ’The sky is solemn, as if it would say “this is the day of the Lord."’

Artistic feeling for Nature became a worship with Claude Lorraine.

The Netherlands recorded all Nature’s phases in noble emulation with ever-increasing delight.

The poetry of air, cloudland, light, the cool freshness of morning, the hazy sultriness of noon, the warm light of evening, it all lives and moves in Cuyp’s pictures and Wynant’s, while Aart van der Meer painted moonlight and winter snow, and Jan van Goyen the melancholy of mist shot by sunlight.  He, too—­Jan van Goyen—­was very clever in producing effect with very small means, with a few trees reflected in water, or a sand-heap—­the art in which Ruysdael excelled all others.  The whole poetry of Nature—­that secret magic which lies like a spell over quiet wood, murmuring sea, still pool, and lonely pasture—­took form and colour under his hands; so little sufficed to enchant, to rouse thought and feeling, and lead them whither he would.  Northern seriousness and sadness brood over most of his work; the dark trees are overhung by heavy clouds and rain, mist and dusky shadows move among his ruins.  He had painted, says Carriere, the peace of woodland solitude long before Tieck found the word for it.

Beechwoods reflected in a stream, misty cloud masses lighted by the rising sun; he moves us with such things as with a morning hymn, and his picture of a swollen torrent forcing its way between graves which catch the last rays of the sun, while a cloud of rain shrouds the ruins of a church in the background, is an elegy which has taken shape and colour.

Ruysdael marks the culminating point of this period of development, which had led from mere backgrounds and single traits of Nature—­even a flower stem or a blade of grass, up to elaborate compositions imbued by a single motive, a single idea.

To conjure up with slight material a complete little world of its own, and waken responsive feeling, is not this the secret of the charm in the pictures of his school—­in the wooded hill or peasant’s courtyard by Hobbema, the Norwegian mountain scene of Albert van Everdingen, the dusky fig-trees, rugged crags, and foaming cataract, or the half-sullen, half-smiling sea-pieces of Bakhuysen and Van der Velde?

All these great Netherlander far outstripped the poetry of their time; it was a hundred years later before mountain and sea found their painter in words, and a complete landscape picture was not born in German poetry until the end of the eighteenth century.