rs was of course ascribed to it in the same
connection with its red color. The reader may be interested to see
the notice, in 'Modern Painters,' of Turner's constant use of the
same symbol; partly an expression of his own personal feeling,
partly, the employment of a symbolic language known to all careful
readers of solar and stellar tradition.

"He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the association
of any subject with circumstances of death, especially the death of
multitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply _crimsoned_
sunset skies.

"The color of blood is thus plainly taken for the leading tone in
the storm-clouds above the 'Slave-ship.' It occurs with similar
distinctness in the much earlier picture of 'Ulysses and
Polypheme,' in that of 'Napoleon at St. Helena,' and, subdued by
softer hues, in the 'Old Temeraire.'

"The sky of this Goldau is, in its scarlet and crimson, the deepest
in tone of all that I know in Turner's drawings.

"Another feeling, traceable in several of his former works, is an
acute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idle
pleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time for
labor, or knowledge, or delight, is passed forever. There is
evidence of this feeling in the introduction of the boys at play in
the churchyard of Kirkby Lonsdale, and the boy climbing for his
kite among the thickets above the little mountain churchyard of
Brignal-bank; it is in the same tone of thought that he has placed
here the two figures fishing, leaning against these shattered
flanks of rock,--the sepulchral stones of the great mountain Field
of Death."]

[Footnote 6: 'Thy lore unto calamity.'--It is, I believe,
recognized by all who have in any degree become interested in the
traditions of Chaldean astrology, that its warnings were
distinct,--its promises deceitful. Horace thus warns Leuconoe
against reading the Babylonian numbers to learn the time of her
death,--he does not imply their promise of previous happiness; and
the continually deceptive character of the Delphic oracle itself,
tempted always rather to fatal than to fortunate conduct, unless
the inquirer were more than wise in his reading. Byron gathers into
the bitter question all the sorrow of former superstition, while in
the lines italicized, just above, he sums in the briefest and
plainest English, all that we yet know, or may wisely think, about
the Sun. It is the '_Burning_ oracle' (other orac