In reality Turner was the same from the beginning. He circled round the fire like a moth, and craved, like Goethe, for more light; he wanted to achieve the impossible and paint the sun. To attain his object nothing was too difficult for him. He restrained himself for a long time; placed himself amongst the followers of the painter of light _par excellence_; studied, analysed, and copied Claude Lorrain; completely adopted his style, and painted pictures which threw Claude into eclipse by their magnificence and luminous power of colour. The painting of "Dido building Carthage" is perhaps the most characteristic of this phase of his art. One feels that the masses of architecture are merely there for the sake of the painter; the tree in the foreground has only been planted in this particular way so that the background may recede into farther distance. The colour is splendid, though still heavy. By the union of the principles of classic drawing with an entirely modern feeling for atmosphere something chaotic and confused is frequently introduced into the compositions of these years. But at the hour when it was said to him, "You are the real Claude Lorrain," he answered, "Now I am going to leave school and begin to be Turner." Henceforth he no longer needs Claude's framework of trees to throw the light beaming into the corners of his pictures. At first he busied himself with the atmospheric phenomena of the land of mist. Then when the everlasting grey became too splenetic for him he repaired to the relaxing, luxuriant sensuousness of Southern seas, and sought the full embodiment of his dreams of light in the land of the sun. It is impossible in words to give a representation of the essence of Turner; even copies merely excite false conceptions. "Rockets shot up, shocks of cannon thundered, balls of light mounted, crackers meandered through the air and burst, wheels hissed, each one separately, then in pairs, then altogether, and even more turbulently one after the other and together." Thus has Goethe described a display of fireworks in _The Elective Affinities_, and this passage perhaps conveys most readily the impression of Turner's pictures. To collect into a small space the greatest possible quantity of light, he makes the perspective wide and deep and the sky boundless, and uses the sea to reflect the brilliancy. He wanted to be able to render the liquid, shining depths of the sky without employing the earth as an object of comparison, and these studies which have merely the sky as their object are perhaps his most astonishing works. Everywhere, to the border of the picture, there is light. And he has painted all the gradations of light, from the silvery morning twilight to the golden splendour of the evening red. Volcanoes hiss and explode and vomit forth streams of lava, which set the trembling air aglow, and blind the eyes with flaring colours. The glowing ball of the sun rises behind the mist,