that in grim repose
Expects his evening prey."

I notice above the subject of his last marine picture, the Wreck-buoy,
and I am well persuaded that from that year 1818, when first he saw a
ship rent asunder, he never beheld one at sea, without, in his mind's
eye, at the same instant, seeing her skeleton.

But he had seen more than the death of the ship. He had seen the sea
feed her white flames on souls of men; and heard what a storm-gust
sounded like, that had taken up with it, in its swirl of a moment, the
last breaths of a ship's crew. He never forgot either the sight or the
sound. Among the last plates prepared by his own hand for the Liber
Studiorum, (all of them, as was likely from his advanced knowledge,
finer than any previous pieces of the series, and most of them
unfortunately never published, being retained beside him for some last
touch--forever delayed,) perhaps the most important is one of the body
of a drowned sailor, dashed against a vertical rock in the jaws of one
merciless, immeasurable wave. He repeated the same idea, though more
feebly expressed, later in life, in a small drawing of Grandville, on
the coast of France. The sailor clinging to the boat in the marvelous
drawing of Dunbar is another reminiscence of the same kind. He hardly
ever painted a steep rocky coast without some fragment of a devoured
ship, grinding in the blanched teeth of the surges,--just enough left to
be a token of utter destruction. Of his two most important paintings of
definite shipwreck I shall speak presently.

I said that at this period he first was assured of another fact,
namely, that the _Sea_ also was a thing that broke to pieces. The sea up
to that time had been generally regarded by painters as a liquidly
composed, level-seeking consistent thing, with a smooth surface, rising
to a water-mark on sides of ships; in which ships were scientifically to
be embedded, and wetted, up to said water-mark, and to remain dry above
the same. But Turner found during his Southern Coast tour that the sea
was _not_ this: that it was, on the contrary, a very incalculable and
unhorizontal thing, setting its "water mark" sometimes on the highest
heavens, as well as on sides of ships;--very breakable into pieces; half
of a wave separable from the other half, and on the instant carriageable
miles inland;--not in any wise limiting itself to a state of apparent
liquidity, but now striking like a steel gauntlet, and now becoming a
c