d break, each appears to the mind a separate
individual, whose part being performed, it perishes, and is succeeded by
another; and there is nothing in this to impress us with the idea of
restlessness, any more than in any successive and continuous functions
of life and death. But it is when we perceive that it is no succession
of wave, but the same water constantly rising, and crashing, and
recoiling, and rolling in again in new forms and with fresh fury, that
we perceive the perturbed spirit, and feel the intensity of its
unwearied rage. The sensation of power is also trebled; for not only is
the vastness of apparent size much increased, but the whole action is
different; it is not a passive wave rolling sleepily forward until it
tumbles heavily, prostrated upon the beach, but a sweeping exertion of
tremendous and living strength, which does not now appear to _fall_, but
to _burst_ upon the shore; which never perishes, but recoils and
recovers.

Sec. 32. Turner's expression of heavy rolling sea.

Sec. 33. With peculiar expression of weight.

Aiming at these grand characters of the Sea, Turner almost always places
the spectator, not on the shore, but twenty or thirty yards from it,
beyond the first range of the breakers, as in the Land's End, Fowey,
Dunbar, and Laugharne. The latter has been well engraved, and may be
taken as a standard of the expression of fitfulness and power. The grand
division of the whole space of the sea by a few dark continuous furrows
of tremendous swell, (the breaking of one of which alone has strewed the
rocks in front with ruin,) furnishes us with an estimate of space and
strength, which at once reduces the men upon the shore to insects; and
yet through this terrific simplicity there is indicated a fitfulness and
fury in the tossing of the individual lines, which give to the whole sea
a wild, unwearied, reckless incoherency, like that of an enraged
multitude, whose masses act together in frenzy, while not one individual
feels as another. Especial attention is to be directed to the flatness
of all the lines, for the same principle holds in sea which we have seen
in mountains. All the size and sublimity of nature are given not by the
height, but by the breadth of her masses: and Turner, by following her
in her sweeping lines, while he does not lose the elevation of its
surges, adds in a tenfold degree to their power: farther, observe the
peculiar expression of _weight_ which there is in Tur