loud, and vanishing, no eye could tell whither; one moment a flint
cave, the next a marble pillar, the next a mere white fleece thickening
the thundery rain. He never forgot those facts; never afterwards was
able to recover the idea of positive distinction between sea and sky, or
sea and land. Steel gauntlet, black rock, white cloud, and men and masts
gnashed to pieces and disappearing in a few breaths and splinters among
them;--a little blood on the rock angle, like red sea-weed, sponged away
by the next splash of the foam, and the glistering granite and green
water all pure again in vacant wrath. So stayed by him, forever, the
Image of the Sea.

One effect of this revelation of the nature of ocean to him was not a
little singular. It seemed that ever afterwards his appreciation of the
calmness of water was deepened by what he had witnessed of its frenzy,
and a certain class of entirely tame subjects were treated by him even
with increased affection after he had seen the full manifestation of
sublimity. He had always a great regard for canal boats, and instead of
sacrificing these old, and one would have thought unentertaining,
friends to the deities of Storm, he seems to have returned with a
lulling pleasure from the foam and danger of the beach to the sedgy bank
and stealthy barge of the lowland river. Thenceforward his work which
introduces shipping is divided into two classes; one embodying the
poetry of silence and calmness, the other of turbulence and wrath. Of
intermediate conditions he gives few examples; if he lets the wind down
upon the sea at all, it is nearly always violent, and though the waves
may not be running high, the foam is torn off them in a way which shows
they will soon run higher. On the other hand, nothing is so perfectly
calm as Turner's calmness. To the canal barges of England he soon added
other types of languid motion; the broad-ruddered barks of the Loire,
the drooping sails of Seine, the arcaded barks of the Italian lakes
slumbering on expanse of mountain-guarded wave, the dreamy prows of
pausing gondolas on lagoons at moon-rise; in each and all commanding an
intensity of calm, chiefly because he never admitted an instant's
rigidity. The surface of quiet water with other painters becomes FIXED.
With Turner it looks as if a fairy's breath would stir it, but the
fairy's breath is not there. So also his boats are intensely motionless,
because intensely capable of motion. No other painter ever