None of these things very glorious; the best, however, that England, it seems, was then able to provide for a boy of gift:  who, such as they are, loves them—­never, indeed, forgets them.  The short waists modify to the last his visions of Greek ideal.  His foregrounds had always a succulent cluster or two of greengrocery at the corners.  Enchanted oranges gleam in Covent Gardens of the Hesperides; and great ships go to pieces in order to scatter chests of them on the waves.[122] That mist of early sunbeams in the London dawn crosses, many and many a time, the clearness of Italian air; and by Thames’ shore, with its stranded barges and glidings of red sail, dearer to us than Lucerne lake or Venetian lagoon,—­by Thames’ shore we will die.

With such circumstance round him in youth, let us note what necessary effects followed upon the boy.  I assume him to have had Giorgione’s sensibility (and more than Giorgione’s, if that be possible) to colour and form.  I tell you farther, and this fact you may receive trustfully, that his sensibility to human affection and distress was no less keen than even his sense for natural beauty—­heart-sight deep as eyesight.

Consequently, he attaches himself with the faithfullest child-love to everything that bears an image of the place he was born in.  No matter how ugly it is,—­has it anything about it like Maiden Lane, or like Thames’ shore?  If so, it shall be painted for their sake.  Hence, to the very close of life, Turner could endure ugliness which no one else, of the same sensibility, would have borne with for an instant.  Dead brick walls, blank square windows, old clothes, market-womanly types of humanity—­anything fishy and muddy, like Billingsgate or Hungerford Market, had great attraction for him; black barges, patched sails, and every possible condition of fog.

You will find these tolerations and affections guiding or sustaining him to the last hour of his life; the notablest of all such endurances being that of dirt.  No Venetian ever draws anything foul; but Turner devoted picture after picture to the illustration of effects of dinginess, smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture; old sides of boats, weedy roadside vegetation, dunghills, straw-yards, and all the soilings and stains of every common labour.

And more than this, he not only could endure, but enjoyed and looked for litter, like Covent Garden wreck after the market.  His pictures are often full of it, from side to side; their foregrounds differ from all others in the natural way that things have of lying about in them.  Even his richest vegetation, in ideal work, is confused; and he delights in shingle, debris, and heaps of fallen stones.  The last words he ever spoke to me about a picture were in gentle exultation about his St. Gothard:  “that litter of stones which I endeavoured to represent.”