ion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid
shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night,
which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon
the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin
masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation
in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its
flaming flood with the sunlight,--and cast far along the desolate
heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

[Footnote 42: Turner's "Slave Ship" was long in Ruskin's possession,
if not actually his property. It afterward came to America, and in New
York was placed on public exhibition some thirty years ago. It is now
in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.]

I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any
single work, I should choose this. Its daring conception--ideal in the
highest sense of the word--is based on the purest truth, and wrought out
with the concentrated knowledge of a life; its color is absolutely
perfect, not one false or morbid hue in any part or line, and so
modulated that every square inch of canvas is a perfect composition; its
drawing as accurate as fearless; the ship buoyant, bending, and full of
motion; its tones as true as they are wonderful; and the whole picture
dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions--(completing
thus the perfect system of all truth, which we have shown to be formed
by Turner's works)--the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open,
deep, illimitable sea.

GEORGE ELIOT

Born in 1819, died in 1880; assistant editor of the
_Westminster Review_ in 1851; lived with George Henry Lewes
from 1854 until his death in 1878; married John W. Cross in
1880; translated Strauss's "Life of Jesus" in 1846,
published "Scenes of Clerical Life" in 1858, "Adam Bede" in
1859, "Romola" in 1862, "Middlemarch" in 1871, "Daniel
Deronda" in 1876.

AT THE HALL FARM[43]

Evidently that gate is never opened; for the long grass and the great
hemlocks grow close against it; and if it were opened, it is so rusty
that the force necessary to turn it on its hinges would be likely to
pull down the square stone-built pillars, to the detriment of the two
stone lionesses which grin with a doubtful carnivorous affability
above a coat of arms surmounting each of the pillars. It would be easy
enough, by the