Well did Turner know the meaning of that battle: he has told its tale with fearful distinctness. The Mammon dragon was armed with adamant; but this dragon of decay is a mere colossal worm: wounded, he bursts asunder in the midst,[4] and melts to pieces, rather than dies, vomiting smoke--a smaller serpent-worm rising out of his blood. § 12. Alas, for Turner! This smaller serpent-worm, it seemed, he could not conceive to be slain. In the midst of all the power and beauty of nature, he still saw this death-worm writhing among the weeds. A little thing now, yet enough; you may see it in the foreground of the Bay of Baiæ, which has also in it the story of Apollo and the Sibyl; Apollo giving love; but not youth, nor immortality: you may see it again in the foreground of the Lake Avernus--the Hades lake--which Turner surrounds with delicatest beauty, the Fates dancing in circle; but in front, is the serpent beneath the thistle and the wild thorn. The same Sibyl, Deiphobe, holding the golden bough. I cannot get at the meaning of this legend of the bough; but it was, assuredly, still connected, in Turner's mind, with that help from Apollo. He indicated the strength of his feeling at the time when he painted the Python contest, by the drawing exhibited the same year, of the Prayer of Chryses. There the priest is on the beach alone, the sun setting. He prays to it as it descends;--flakes of its sheeted light are borne to him by the melancholy waves, and cast away with sighs upon the sand. How this sadness came to be persistent over Turner, and to conquer him, we shall see in a little while. It is enough for us to know at present that our most wise and Christian England, with all her appurtenances of school-porch and church-spire, had so disposed her teaching as to leave this somewhat notable child of hers without even cruel Pandora's gift. He was without hope. True daughter of Night, Hesperid Æglé was to him; coming between Censure, and Sorrow,--and the Destinies. § 13. What, for us, his work yet may be, I know not. But let not the real nature of it be misunderstood any more. He is distinctively, as he rises into his own peculiar strength, separating himself from all men who had painted forms of the physical world before,--the painter of the loveliness of nature, with the worm at its root: Rose and cankerworm,--both with his utmost strength; the one _never_ separate from the other. In which his work was the true image of his own mind. I would fain have looked last at the rose; but that is not the way Atropos will have it, and there is no pleading with her. So, therefore, first of the rose.