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 yourself or than any meaner burden.  You lift the world, you raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up.  It is like the scene in the Vatican when a Cardinal, with his dramatic Italian hands, bids the kneeling groups to arise.  He does more than bid them.  He lifts them, he gathers them up, far and near, with the upward gesture of both arms; he takes them to their feet with the compulsion of his expressive force.  Or it is as when a conductor takes his players to successive heights of music.  You summon the sea, you bring the mountains, the distances unfold unlooked-for wings and take an even flight.  You are but a man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but as you climb the circle of the world goes up to face you.

Not here or there, but with a definite continuity, the unseen unfolds.  This distant hill outsoars that less distant, but all are on the wing, and the plain raises its verge.  All things follow and wait upon your eyes.  You lift these up, not by the raising of your eyelids, but by the pilgrimage of your body.  “Lift thine eyes to the mountains.”  It is then that other mountains lift themselves to your human eyes.