Turner painted still another kind of imaginary landscape, not in rivalry with any one, but to please himself.  Of course you all know the story of Ulysses and the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, in the Odyssey of Homer?  Turner chose for his picture the moment when Ulysses has escaped from the clutches of Polyphemus, and sailing away in his boat, taunts the giant, who stands by the water’s edge, cursing Ulysses and bemoaning the loss of his sight.  Turner has used this mythical scene as an opportunity for creating stupendous rocks never seen by a pair of mortal eyes, and a galley worthy of heroes or gods.  The picture is the purest phantasy, even more like a fairy-tale than the story it illustrates.  He has made the whole scene burn in the red light of a flaming sunrise, redder by far than the sunset of the old ‘Temeraire.’

The story is told of a gentleman who, looking at a picture of Turner’s, said to him, ‘I never saw a sunset like that.’  ’No, but don’t you wish you could?’ replied Turner.  That is what we feel about the sunrise in the picture of Ulysses and Polyphemus.  Next to it in the National Gallery hangs another picture called ’Rain, Steam, and Speed’—­the Great Western Railway.  From the realm of the mythical, this takes us back to the class of scenes of which the ‘Fighting Temeraire’ is one, actually beheld by Turner, but magically transfigured by his brush.  A train is coming towards us over a bridge, prosaic subject enough, especially in 1844, when railways were supposed to be ruining the aspect of the country and were hated by beauty-loving people.  But Turner saw romance in the swift passage of a train, and painted a picture in which smoke and rain, cloud and sunset, river and bridge, boats and trees, are all fused in a mist, pearly and golden as well as smutty and grey.  When you look at it, you must stand away and look long, till gradually the vision of Turner shapes itself before your eyes and the scene as he beheld it lives again for you.

We saw how Venice opened his eyes to flaming colour.  In his pictures of Venice, her magic beauty is revealed by a delicate sympathy, that re-creates the fairy city in her day of glory.  Never tired of painting her in all her aspects, at morning, at even, in pomp, and at peace, a sight of his pictures is still the best substitute for a visit to the city itself.

Other artists have interpreted scenery beautifully, and a few have painted ideal landscapes, but who besides Turner has ever united such diversities of power?  He continued to paint water-colour sketches to the end of his life, for these were appreciated by a public that did not understand, and neglected to buy, his oil-paintings.  He sketched throughout France and Switzerland for various publications as he had sketched in England.  Time has not damaged these drawings, as it has the pictures in oil, for to the end of his life Turner sometimes used bad materials.  Even the sky of the ‘Fighting Temeraire’ has faded considerably since it was painted, and others of his oil-pictures are mere shadows of their former selves.  It is pathetic to look upon the wreck of work not a century old and to wonder how much of it will be preserved for future generations.