would be difficult to point to another
instance of their being rendered in art. You will find nothing in the
waterfalls even of our best painters, but springing lines of parabolic
descent, and splashing, shapeless foam; and, in consequence, though they
may make you understand the swiftness of the water, they never let you
feel the weight of it; the stream in their hands looks _active_, not
_supine_, as if it leaped, not as if it fell. Now water will leap a
little way, it will leap down a weir or over a stone, but it _tumbles_
over a high fall like this; and it is when we have lost the parabolic
line, and arrived at the catenary,--when we have lost the _spring_ of
the fall, and arrived at the _plunge_ of it, that we begin really to
feel its weight and wildness. Where water takes its first leap from the
top, it is cool, and collected, and uninteresting, and mathematical, but
it is when it finds that it has got into a scrape, and has farther to go
than it thought for, that its character comes out; it is then that it
begins to writhe, and twist, and sweep out zone after zone in wilder
stretching as it falls, and to send down the rocket-like, lance-pointed,
whizzing shafts at its sides, sounding for the bottom. And it is this
prostration, this hopeless abandonment of its ponderous power to the
air, which is always peculiarly expressed by Turner, and especially in
the case before us; while our other artists, keeping to the parabolic
line, where they do not lose themselves in smoke and foam, make their
cataract look muscular and wiry, and may consider themselves fortunate
if they can keep it from stopping. I believe the majesty of motion which
Turner has given by these concentric catenary lines must be felt even by
those who have never seen a high waterfall, and therefore cannot
appreciate their exquisite fidelity to nature.

In the Chain Bridge over the Tees, this passiveness and swinging of the
water to and fro are yet more remarkable; while we have another
characteristic of a great waterfall given to us, that the wind, in this
instance coming up the valley against the current, takes the spray up
off the edges, and carries it back in little torn, reverted rags and
threads, seen in delicate form against the darkness on the left. But we
must understand a little more about the nature of running water before
we can appreciate the drawing either of this, or any other of Turner's
torrents.

Sec. 22. Difference in the action of