Consider deeply the import to him of this, his first sight of ruin, and compare it with the effect of the architecture that was around Giorgione.  There were indeed aged buildings, at Venice, in his time, but none in decay.  All ruin was removed, and its place filled as quickly as in our London; but filled always by architecture loftier and more wonderful than that whose place it took, the boy himself happy to work upon the walls of it; so that the idea of the passing away of the strength of men and beauty of their works never could occur to him sternly.  Brighter and brighter the cities of Italy had been rising and broadening on hill and plain, for three hundred years.  He saw only strength and immortality, could not but paint both; conceived the form of man as deathless, calm with power, and fiery with life.

Turner saw the exact reverse of this.  In the present work of men, meanness, aimlessness, unsightliness:  thin-walled, lath-divided, narrow-garreted houses of clay; booths of a darksome Vanity Fair, busily base.

But on Whitby Hill, and by Bolton Brook,[130] remained traces of other handiwork.  Men who could build had been there; and who also had wrought, not merely for their own days.  But to what purpose?  Strong faith, and steady hands, and patient souls—­can this, then, be all you have left! this the sum of your doing on the earth!—­a nest whence the night-owl may whimper to the brook, and a ribbed skeleton of consumed arches, looming above the bleak banks of mist, from its cliff to the sea?

As the strength of men to Giorgione, to Turner their weakness and vileness, were alone visible.  They themselves, unworthy or ephemeral; their work, despicable, or decayed.  In the Venetian’s eyes, all beauty depended on man’s presence and pride; in Turner’s, on the solitude he had left, and the humiliation he had suffered.

And thus the fate and issue of all his work were determined at once.  He must be a painter of the strength of nature, there was no beauty elsewhere than in that; he must paint also the labour and sorrow and passing away of men:  this was the great human truth visible to him.

Their labour, their sorrow, and their death.  Mark the three.  Labour; by sea and land, in field and city, at forge and furnace, helm and plough.  No pastoral indolence nor classic pride shall stand between him and the troubling of the world; still less between him and the toil of his country,—­blind, tormented, unwearied, marvellous England.

Also their Sorrow; Ruin of all their glorious work, passing away of their thoughts and their honour, mirage of pleasure, FALLACY OF HOPE; gathering of weed on temple step; gaining of wave on deserted strand; weeping of the mother for the children, desolate by her breathless first-born in the streets of the city,[131] desolate by her last sons slain, among the beasts of the field.[132]