I had become much interested about this matter, as the fervor of feeling on either side seemed to denote that there was something real and vital going on, and, while time would not permit my visiting other private collections in London and its neighborhood, I insisted on taking it for one of Turner’s pictures.  It was at the house of one of his devoutest disciples, who has arranged everything in the rooms to harmonize with them.  There were a great many of the earlier period; these seemed to me charming, but superficial, views of Nature.  They were of a character that he who runs may read,—­obvious, simple, graceful.  The later pictures were quite a different matter; mysterious-looking things,—­hieroglyphics of picture, rather than picture itself.  Sometimes you saw a range of red dots, which, after long looking, dawned on you as the roofs of houses,—­shining streaks turned out to be most alluring rivulets, if traced with patience and a devout eye.  Above all, they charmed the eye and the thought.  Still, these pictures, it seems to me, cannot be considered fine works of Art, more than the mystical writing common to a certain class of minds in the United States can be called good writing.  A great work of Art demands a great thought, or a thought of beauty adequately expressed.  Neither in Art nor literature more than in life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well dressed.  But in a transition state, whether of Art or literature, deeper thoughts are imperfectly expressed, because they cannot yet be held and treated masterly.  This seems to be the case with Turner.  He has got beyond the English gentleman’s conventional view of Nature, which implies a little sentiment and a very cultivated taste; he has become awake to what is elemental, normal, in Nature,—­such, for instance, as one sees in the working of water on the sea-shore.  He tries to represent these primitive forms.  In the drawings of Piranesi, in the pictures of Rembrandt, one sees this grand language exhibited more truly.  It is not picture, but certain primitive and leading effects of light and shadow, or lines and contours, that captivate the attention.  I saw a picture of Rembrandt’s at the Louvre, whose subject I do not know and have never cared to inquire.  I cannot analyze the group, but I understand and feel the thought it embodies.  At something similar Turner seems aiming; an aim so opposed to the practical and outward tendency of the English mind, that, as a matter of course, the majority find themselves mystified, and thereby angered, but for the same reason answering to so deep and seldom satisfied a want in the minds of the minority, as to secure the most ardent sympathy where any at all can be elicited.