stead of letting it fling itself off naturally,
it supports it, and, drives it back, or scrapes it off, and carries it
bodily away; so that the spray at the top is in a continual transition
between forms projected by their own weight, and forms blown and carried
off with their weight overcome; then at last, when it has come down, who
shall say what shape that may be called, which shape has none of the
great crash where it touches the beach.

I think it is that last crash which is the great taskmaster. Nobody can
do anything with it. I have seen Copley Fielding come very close to the
jerk and nod of the lifted threatening edge, curl it very successfully,
and without any look of its having been in papers, down nearly to the
beach, but the final fall has no thunder in it. Turner has tried hard
for it once or twice, but it will not do. The moment is given in the
Sidon of the Bible Illustrations, and more elaborately in a painting of
Bamborough; in both these cases there is little foam at the bottom, and
the fallen breaker looks like a wall, yet grand always; and in the
latter picture very beautifully assisted in expression by the tossing of
a piece of cable, which some figures are dragging ashore, and which the
breaker flings into the air as it falls. Perhaps the most successful
rendering of the forms was in the Hero and Leander, but there the
drawing was rendered easier by the powerful effect of light which
disguised the foam.

Sec. 31. Their effect, how injured when seen from the shore.

It is not, however, from the shore that Turner usually studies his sea.
Seen from the land, the curl of the breakers, even in nature, is
somewhat uniform and monotonous; the size of the waves out at sea is
uncomprehended, and those nearer the eye seem to succeed and resemble
each other, to move slowly to the beach, and to break in the same lines
and forms.

Afloat even twenty yards from the shore, we receive a totally different
impression. Every wave around us appears vast--every one different from
all the rest--and the breakers present, now that we see them with their
backs towards us, the grand, extended, and varied lines of long
curvature, which are peculiarly expressive both of velocity and power.
Recklessness, before unfelt, is manifested in the mad, perpetual,
changeful, undirected motion, not of wave after wave, as it appears from
the shore, but of the very same water rising and falling. Of waves that
successively approach an