considered; but the lips, so to speak, which lie along these lines, are
full, projecting, and marked by beautiful light and shade; each has its
high light, a gradation into shadow of indescribable delicacy, a bright
reflected light and a dark cast shadow; to draw all this requires labor,
and care, and firmness of work, which, as I imagine, must always,
however skilfully bestowed, destroy all impression of wildness,
accidentalism, and evanescence, and so kill the sea. Again, the openings
in the thin subsided foam in their irregular modifications of circular
and oval shapes dragged hither and thither, would be hard enough to draw
even if they could be seen on a flat surface; instead of which, every
one of the openings is seen in undulation on a tossing surface, broken
up over small surges and ripples, and so thrown into perspectives of the
most hopeless intricacy. Now it is not easy to express the lie of a
pattern with oval openings on the folds of drapery. I do not know that
any one under the mark of Veronese or Titian could even do this as it
ought to be done, yet in drapery much stiffness and error may be
overlooked; not so in sea,--the slightest inaccuracy, the slightest want
of flow and freedom in the line, is attached by the eye in a moment of
high treason, and I believe success to be impossible.

Yet there is not a wave or any violently agitated sea on which both
these forms do not appear, the latter especially, after some time of
storm, extends over their whole surfaces; the reader sees, therefore,
why I said that sea could only be painted by means of more or less
dexterous conventionalisms, since two of its most enduring phenomena
cannot be represented at all.

Sec. 30. Character of shore-breakers, also inexpressible.

Again, as respects the form of breakers on an even shore, there is
difficulty of no less formidable kind. There is in them an
irreconcilable mixture of fury and formalism. Their hollow surface is
marked by parallel lines, like those of a smooth mill-weir, and
graduated by reflected and transmitted lights of the most wonderful
intricacy, its curve being at the same time necessarily of mathematical
purity and precision; yet at the top of this curve, when it nods over,
there is a sudden laxity and giving way, the water swings and jumps
along the ridge like a shaken chain, and the motion runs from part to
part as it does through a serpent's body. Then the wind is at work on
the extreme edge, and in