Turner was supreme because he, and he only, estimated at its full value the poetry and the majesty of the sea; because he alone could grasp its immensity and its tragic strength and yet be exquisitely in sympathy with its smiling serenity and placid calm. Turner saw and understood the drama of the sea, and by the largeness of his vision and the depth of his understanding he was enabled to present this drama in all its varieties of action. But then, Turner had not only “the eye of an eagle”--as Ruskin said of him--he had, too, the gift of imagination by which realities are transmuted into poetic suggestion. Accuracy of detail and plain statement of fact were the foundations on which his art was built (and no one made more sure of his facts or looked more closely into details), but the superstructure he erected was designed and arranged to express his own large conception of his motive as a whole, and to illustrate the workings of his own emotion. Therefore, when he painted the sea it was the appeal that his subjects made to his imagination that directed and established the final result; and how strong this appeal was can be judged from the amazing beauty and power of his accomplishment as a marine painter. Although it has been given to no other artist to rival or approach Turner in mastery of accomplishment, although it is difficult to believe that there can ever be another painter who will be able to claim equality with him in the same sphere of art, the stimulus of Turner’s example must always be vividly felt by every true student of nature, and especially by every one who aspires to paint marine subjects in the right manner. For, certainly, the poetry of the sea and the drama of the sea are among the most salient of its characteristics, and there is surrounding it an atmosphere of sentiment that must be sympathetically perceived. A commonplace and matter-of-fact statement of wave forms would be about as worthless artistically as an architectural elevation of a mountain range, and the more coldly and scientifically correct it was the less would it convey of the spirit of the sea. The frame of mind in which the painter must assume his task must be akin to that of Thomson when he wrote: “Thou, majestic main A secret world of wonders in thyself!” and in this world of wonders he must be prepared always to find some new secret which will deepen his sense of the mystery of the sea and make him feel that with all his striving he has touched only the fringe of its romance. At no stage in his study will he be in a position to say that he has learned enough and that his subject has no more to reveal; every fresh discovery will open up to him new matters for investigation, and suggest other lines of thought.