[13] I have not followed out, as I ought to have done, had the task been less painful, my assertion that Turner had to paint not only the labor and the sorrow of men, but their death. There is no form of violent death which he has not painted. Pre-eminent in many things, he is pre-eminent also, bitterly, in this. Durer and Holbein drew the skeleton in its questioning; but Turner, like Salvator, as under some strange fascination or captivity, drew it at its work. Flood, and fire, and wreck, and battle, and pestilence; and solitary death, more fearful still. The noblest of all the plates of the Liber Studiorum, except the Via Mala, is one engraved with his own hand, of a single sailor, yet living, dashed in the night against a granite coast,--his body and outstretched hands just seen in the trough of a mountain wave, between it and the overhanging wall of rock, hollow, polished, and pale with dreadful cloud and grasping foam. And remember, also, that the very sign in heaven itself which, truly understood, is the type of love, was to Turner the type of death. The scarlet of the clouds was his symbol of destruction. In his mind it was the color of blood. So he used it in the Fall of Carthage. Note his own written words-- "While o'er the western wave the _ensanguined_ sun, In gathering huge a stormy signal spread, And set portentous." So he used it in the Slaver, in the Ulysses, in the Napoleon, in the Goldau; again and again in slighter hints and momentary dreams, of which one of the saddest and most tender is a little sketch of dawn, made in his last years. It is a small space of level sea shore; beyond it a fair, soft light in the east; the last storm-clouds melting away, oblique into the morning air; some little vessel--a collier, probably--has gone down in the night, all hands lost; a single dog has come ashore. Utterly exhausted, its limbs failing under it, and, sinking into the sand, it stands howling and shivering. The dawn-clouds have the first scarlet upon them, a feeble tinge only, reflected with the same feeble blood-stain on the sand.