vessel to her grave.  A ruin cannot be so, for whatever memories may be connected with it, and whatever witness it may have borne to the courage and glory of men, it never seems to have offered itself to their danger, and associated itself with their acts, as a ship of battle can.  The mere facts of motion, and obedience to human guidance, double the interest of the vessel:  nor less her organized perfectness, giving her the look, and partly the character of a living creature, that may indeed be maimed in limb or decrepit in frame, but must either live or die, and cannot be added to nor diminished from—­heaped up and dragged down—­as a building can.  And this particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar hour of trial with chief victory—­prevailing over the fatal vessel that had given Nelson death—­surely, if ever anything without a soul deserved honour or affection, we owed them here.  Those sails that strained so full bent into the battle—­that broad bow that struck the surf aside, enlarging silently in steadfast haste full front to the shot—­resistless and without reply—­those triple ports whose choirs of flame rang forth in their courses, into the fierce revenging monotone, which, when it died away, left no answering voice to rise any more upon the sea against the strength of England—­those sides that were wet with the long runlets of English life-blood, like press planks at vintage, gleaming goodly crimson down to the cast and clash of the washing foam—­those pale masts that stayed themselves up against the war-ruin, shaking out their ensigns through the thunder, till sail and ensign drooped—­steeped in the death-stilled pause of Andalusian air, burning with its witness-clouds of human souls at rest,—­surely, for these some sacred care might have been left in our thoughts, some quiet space amidst the lapse of English waters?  Nay, not so.  We have stern keepers to trust her glory to—­the fire and the worm.  Never more shall sunset lay golden robe on her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at her gliding.  Perhaps, where the low gate opens to some cottage-garden, the tired traveller may ask, idly, why the moss grows so green on its rugged wood; and even the sailor’s child may not answer, nor know, that the night-dew lies deep in the war-rents of the wood of the old Temeraire.  And, lastly, the pathos of the picture—­the contrast of the old ship’s past glory with her present end; and the spectacle of the “old order” of the ship of the line whose flag had braved the battle and the breeze, yielding place to the new, in the little steam-tug—­these pathetic contrasts are repeated and enforced by a technical tour de force in the treatment of the colours which is without a parallel in art.  And the picture itself thus combines the evidences of Turner’s supremacy alike in imagination and in skill.  The old masters, content with one simple tone, sacrificed to its unity all the exquisite gradations and varied touches of relief and change by which nature unites