e more and more unveiled. We have thus the
painting, not of a mere transparent veil, but of a solid body of cloud,
every inch of whose increasing distance is marked and felt. But the
great wonder of the picture is the intensity of gloom which is attained
in pure warm gray, without either blackness or blueness. It is a gloom,
dependent rather on the enormous space and depth indicated, than on
actual pitch of color, distant by real drawing, without a grain of blue,
dark by real substance, without a stroke of blackness; and with all
this, it is not formless, but full of indications of character, wild,
irregular, shattered, and indefinite--full of the energy of storm, fiery
in haste, and yet flinging back out of its motion the fitful swirls of
bounding drift, of tortured vapor tossed up like men's hands, as in
defiance of the tempest, the jets of resulting whirlwind, hurled back
from the rocks into the face of the coming darkness; which, beyond all
other characters, mark the raised passion of the elements. It is this
untraceable, unconnected, yet perpetual form--this fulness of character
absorbed in the universal energy--which distinguish nature and Turner
from all their imitators. To roll a volume of smoke before the wind, to
indicate motion or violence by monotonous similarity of line and
direction, is for the multitude; but to mark the independent passion,
the tumultuous separate existence of every wreath of writhing vapor, yet
swept away and overpowered by one omnipotence of storm, and thus to bid
us

"Be as a Presence or a motion--one
Among the many there----while the mists
Flying, and rainy vapors, call out shapes
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth,
As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument,"--

this belongs only to nature and to him.

Sec. 18. Deep studied form of swift rain-cloud in the Coventry.

Sec. 19. Compared with forms given by Salvator.

The drawing of Coventry may be particularized as a farther example of
this fine suggestion of irregularity and fitfulness, through very
constant parallelism of direction, both in rain and clouds. The great
mass of cloud, which traverses the whole picture, is characterized
throughout by severe right lines, nearly parallel with each other, into
which every one of its wreaths has a tendency to range itself; but no
one of these right lines is actually