structures of the
Alps which, in the course of half a volume, it has been possible for me
to explain; and all my half-volume is abstracted in these two drawings,
and that in the most consistent and complete way, as if they had been
made on purpose to contain a perfect summary of Alpine truth.

Sec. 24. There are one or two points connected with them of yet more
touching interest. They are the last drawings which Turner ever made
with unabated power. The one of the St. Gothard, speaking with strict
accuracy, is _the_ last drawing; for that of Goldau, though majestic to
the utmost in conception, is less carefully finished, and shows, in the
execution of parts of the sky, signs of impatience, caused by the first
feeling of decline of strength. Therefore I called the St. Gothard (Vol.
III. Ch. XV. Sec. 5) the last mountain drawing he ever executed with
perfect power. But the Goldau is still a noble companion to it--more
solemn in thought, more sublime in color, and, in certain points of
poetical treatment, especially characteristic of the master's mind in
earlier days. He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the
association of any subject with circumstances of death, especially the
death of multitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply
_crimsoned_ sunset skies. The color of blood is this plainly taken for
the leading tone in the storm-clouds above the "Slave-ship." It occurs
with similar distinctness in the much earlier picture of Ulysses and
Polypheme, in that of Napoleon at St. Helena, and, subdued by softer
hues, in the Old Temeraire. The sky of this Goldau is, in its scarlet
and crimson, the deepest in tone of all that I know in Turner's
drawings. Another feeling traceable in several of its former works, is
an acute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idle
pleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time for labor, or
knowledge, or delight is passed for ever. There is evidence of this
feeling in the introduction of the boys at play in the churchyard of
Kirkby Lonsdale, and the boy climbing for his kite among the thickets
above the little mountain churchyard of Brignal-banks; it is in the same
tone of thought that he has placed here the two figures fishing, leaning
against these shattered flanks of rock,--the sepulchral stones of the
great mountain Field of Death.

Sec. 25. Another character of these two drawings, which gives them especial
interest as connected with our