Compare his chances, once more, with those
of a man like Turner. From earliest childhood, Turner's days and nights
have been bountiful to him in many-coloured impressions. At the outset
he saw and had part in those rural activities, changeful, accomplished,
carried on by many forms of skill and directed by a vast amount of
traditional wisdom, whereby the country people of England had for ages
supported themselves in their quiet valleys. His brain still teems with
recollections of all this industry. And then to those recollections must
be added memories of the scenes in which the industry went on--the wide
landscapes, the glowing cornfields, the meadows, woods, heaths; and
likewise the details of barn and rick-yard, and stable and cow-stall,
and numberless other corners into which his work has taken him. To
anyone who understands them, those details are themselves like an
interesting book, full of "idea" legible everywhere in the shapes which
country craftsmanship gave to them; and Turner understands them through
and through. Nor is this all. If not actual adventure and romance, still
many of the factors of adventure and romance have accompanied him
through his life; so that it is good even to think of all that he has
seen. He has had experience (travelling down to Sussex) of the dead
silence of country roads at midnight under the stars; has known the
August sunrise, and the afternoon heat, and the chilly moonlight, high
up on the South Downs; and the glint of the sunshine in apple-orchards
at cider-making time; and the grey coming of the rain that urges a man
to hurry with his thatching; and the thickening of the white winter fog
across the heaths towards night-fall, when wayfarers might miss the
track and wander all night unless they knew well what they were about.
Of such stuff as this for the brain-life to feed upon there has been
great abundance in Turner's career, but of such stuff what memories can
the coal-carter have?

Already in his earliest childhood the principal chances were gone. The
common had been enclosed; no little boys were sent out to mind cows
there all day, and incidentally to look for birds'-nests and acquaint
themselves with the ways of the rabbits and hedgehogs and butterflies
and birds of the heath. Fenced-in property, guarded by the Policeman and
the Law, restricted the boy's games to the shabby waste-places of the
valley, and to the footpaths and roads, where there was not much for a
child to