uous line which glides over the rocks and writhes in
the wind, overwhelming the one, and piercing the other with the form,
fury, and swiftness of a sheet of lambent fire. And throughout the
rendering of all this, there is not one false curve given, not one which
is not the perfect expression of visible motion; and the forms of the
infinite sea are drawn throughout with that utmost mastery of art which,
through the deepest study of every line, makes every line appear the
wildest child of chance, while yet each is in itself a subject and a
picture different from all else around. Of the color of this magnificent
sea I have before spoken; it is a solemn green gray, (with its foam seen
dimly through the darkness of twilight,) modulated with the fulness,
changefulness, and sadness of a deep, wild melody.

Sec. 37. Open seas of Turner's earlier times.

The greater number of Turner's paintings of open sea belong to a
somewhat earlier period than these drawings; nor, generally speaking,
are they of equal value. It appears to me that the artist had at that
time either less knowledge of, or less delight in, the characteristics
of deep water than of coast sea, and that, in consequence, he suffered
himself to be influenced by some of the qualities of the Dutch
sea-painters. In particular, he borrowed from them the habit of casting
a dark shadow on the near waves, so as to bring out a stream of light
behind; and though he did this in a more legitimate way than they, that
is to say, expressing the light by touches on the foam, and indicating
the shadow as cast on foamy surface, still the habit has induced much
feebleness and conventionality in the pictures of the period. His
drawing of the waves was also somewhat petty and divided, small forms
covered with white flat spray, a condition which I doubt not the artist
has seen on some of the shallow Dutch seas, but which I have never met
with myself, and of the rendering of which therefore I cannot speak. Yet
even in these, which I think among the poorest works of the painter, the
expressions of breeze, motion, and light, are very marvellous; and it is
instructive to compare them either with the lifeless works of the Dutch
themselves, or with any modern imitations of them, as for instance with
the seas of Callcott, where all the light is white and all the shadows
gray, where no distinction is made between water and foam, or between
real and reflective shadow, and which are generally wit