id nets of spume, and tearing open
into meshed interstices their churned veil of silver fury, showing still
the calm gray abyss below; that has no fury and no voice, but is as a
grave always open, which the green sighing mounds do but hide for an
instant as they pass. Would they, shuddering back from this wave of the
true, implacable sea, turn forthwith to the papillotes? It might be so.
It is what we are all doing, more or less, continually.

Well, let the waves go their way; it is not of them that we have here
to reason; but be it remembered, that men who cannot enter into the Mind
of the Sea, cannot for the same reason enter into the Mind of Ships, in
their contention with it; and the fluttering, tottering, high-pooped,
flag-beset fleets of these Dutch painters have only this much
superiority over the caricatures of the Italians, that they indeed
appear in some degree to have been studied from the high-pooped and
flag-beset nature which was in that age visible, while the Claude and
Salvator ships are ideals of the studio. But the effort is wholly
unsuccessful. Any one who has ever attempted to sketch a vessel in
motion knows that he might as easily attempt to sketch a bird on the
wing, or a trout on the dart. Ships can only be drawn, as animals must
be, by the high instinct of momentary perception, which rarely developed
itself in any Dutch painter, and least of all in their painters of
marine. And thus the awkward forms of shipping, the shallow impurity of
the sea, and the cold incapacity of the painter, joining in
disadvantageous influence over them, the Dutch marine paintings may be
simply, but circumstantially, described as the misrepresentation of
undeveloped shipping in a discolored sea by distempered painters. An
exception ought to be made in favor of the boats of Cuyp, which are
generally well floated in calm and sunny water; and, though rather punts
or tubs than boats, have in them some elements of a slow, warm,
square-sailed, sleepy grandeur--respectable always, when compared either
with the flickering follies of Backhuysen, or the monstrous, unmanly,
and _a fortiori_, unsailorly absurdities of metaphysical vessels, puffed
on their way by corpulent genii, or pushed by protuberant dolphins,
which Rubens and the other so-called historical painters of his time
were accustomed to introduce in the mythology of their court-adulation;
that marvelous Faith of the 18th century, which will one day, and that
not far o