n the London dawn crosses, many and many a time, the
clearness of Italian air; and by Thames' shore, with its stranded
barges and glidings of red sail, dearer to us than Lucerne lake or
Venetian lagoon,--by Thames' shore we will die.

With such circumstance round him in youth, let us note what necessary
effects followed upon the boy. I assume him to have had Giorgione's
sensibility (and more than Giorgione's, if that be possible) to colour
and form. I tell you farther, and this fact you may receive trustfully,
that his sensibility to human affection and distress was no less keen
than even his sense for natural beauty--heart-sight deep as eyesight.

Consequently, he attaches himself with the faithfullest child-love to
everything that bears an image of the place he was born in. No matter
how ugly it is,--has it anything about it like Maiden Lane, or like
Thames' shore? If so, it shall be painted for their sake. Hence, to the
very close of life, Turner could endure ugliness which no one else, of
the same sensibility, would have borne with for an instant. Dead brick
walls, blank square windows, old clothes, market-womanly types of
humanity--anything fishy and muddy, like Billingsgate or Hungerford
Market, had great attraction for him; black barges, patched sails, and
every possible condition of fog.

You will find these tolerations and affections guiding or sustaining
him to the last hour of his life; the notablest of all such endurances
being that of dirt. No Venetian ever draws anything foul; but Turner
devoted picture after picture to the illustration of effects of
dinginess, smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture; old sides of boats,
weedy roadside vegetation, dunghills, straw-yards, and all the soilings
and stains of every common labour.

And more than this, he not only could endure, but enjoyed and looked
for _litter_, like Covent Garden wreck after the market. His pictures
are often full of it, from side to side; their foregrounds differ from
all others in the natural way that things have of lying about in them.
Even his richest vegetation, in ideal work, is confused; and he
delights in shingle, debris, and heaps of fallen stones. The last words
he ever spoke to me about a picture were in gentle exultation about his
St. Gothard: "that _litter_ of stones which I endeavoured to
represent."

The second great result of this Covent Garden training was understanding
of and regard for the poor, whom the Venetians, we saw