presages of Art we may diverge and follow his development as a poet by his engravings, without ever making reference to him as a colorist.  But beside being a poet, he was a great color-composer.  If, leaving poetry as recited, we take the ballad, or poetry made fully melodic, we have the single voice, passing through measured inflections and with measured pauses.  Correspondingly, the next in the series of Turner drawings, the “Aysgarth Force,” shows no attempt to give the real color of Nature, but a single color governing the whole drawing, a golden brown passing in shadow into its exact negative.  There is an absolute tint, full, and inflected through every shade of its tones to the bottom of the scale.  The strict analogy is broken in this case by a dash of delicate gray-blue in the sky and gray-red in the figures, the slightest possible accompaniment to his golden-brown melody; but these were not needed, and we find earlier drawings which adhere to the strict monochrome.  In the drawing next in date, the “Hastings from the Sea,” we have the further step from monochrome to polychrome; we have the distinct trio, the golden yellow in the sky, the blue in the sea, and the red in the figures in the boats,—­as in a vocal trio we have the only three possible musical sounds of the human voice, the soprano, the basso, and the falsetto of the child’s voice.  All these colors are distinctly asserted and perfectly harmonized in a most exquisite play of tints, but it is still no more like Nature than the trio in “I Puritani” is like conversation.  Turner never dreamed of painting like Nature, and no sane man ever saw or can see, in this world, Nature in the colors in which he has painted her, any more than he will find men conducting business in operatic notes.

One step farther, and we leave the analogy.  In the “Swiss Valley,” one of his last works, we are from the first conscious that his harmonies have run away with his theme.  In Ole Bull’s “Niagara” we have almost as much of matter-of-fact Nature as in Turner’s “Swiss Valley.”  The eye untrained by study of Turner’s works finds nothing but a blaze of color with no intelligible object, just as we have, in opera, music of which the words are inaudible;—­both are there for practised ear and eye, but in neither case as of primary importance.  Turner has even gone farther, and given us pictures of pure color, as in the illustration of Goethe’s theory of colors,—­a fantasie of the palette.  And why shall Turner not orchestrate color as well as Verdi sound? why not give us his synchromies as well as Beethoven his symphonies?  You prefer common sense,—­Harding and Fripp, Stanfield and Creswick?  Well, suppose you like better to hear some familiar voice talking of past times than to hear “Robert le Diable” ever so well sung, or Hawthorne’s prose better than Browning’s verse,—­it proves nothing, save that you do not care for music and poetry so well as some others do.