into his system, and can be
caught without a dangerous departure from it, he instantly throws his
whole soul into the faithful rendering of them. Thus the usual brown
tones of his foreground become warmed into sudden vigor, and are varied
and enhanced with indescribable delight, when he finds himself by the
shore of a moorland stream, where they truly express the stain of its
golden rocks, and the darkness of its clear, Cairngorm-like pools, and
the usual serenity of his aerial blue is enriched into the softness and
depth of the sapphire, when it can deepen the distant slumber of some
Highland lake, or temper the gloomy shadows of the evening upon its
hills.

The system of his color being thus simplified, he could address all the
strength of his mind to the accumulation of facts of form; his choice of
subject, and his methods of treatment, are therefore as various as his
color is simple; and it is not a little difficult to give the reader who
is unacquainted with his works, an idea either of their infinitude of
aims, on the one hand, or of the kind of feeling which prevades them
all, on the other. No subject was too low or too high for him; we find
him one day hard at work on a cock and hen, with their family of
chickens in a farm-yard; and bringing all the refinement of his
execution into play to express the texture of the plumage; next day, he
is drawing the Dragon of Colchis. One hour he is much interested in a
gust of wind blowing away an old woman's cap; the next he is painting
the fifth plague of Egypt. Every landscape painter before him had
acquired distinction by confining his efforts to one class of subject.
Hobbima painted oaks; Ruysdael, waterfalls and copses; Cuyp, river or
meadow scenes in quiet afternoons; Salvator and Poussin, such kind of
mountain scenery as people could conceive, who lived in towns in the
seventeenth century. But I am well persuaded that if all the works of
Turner, up to the year 1820, were divided into classes (as he has
himself divided them in the Liber Studiorum), no preponderance could be
assigned to one class over another. There is architecture, including a
large number of formal "gentlemen's seats," I suppose drawings
commissioned by the owners; then lowland pastoral scenery of every kind,
including nearly all farming operations,--ploughing, harrowing, hedging
and ditching, felling trees, sheep-washing, and I know not what else;
then all kinds of town life--court-yards of inns, s