What first strikes one in his drawings, apart from their technical skill, is their _individuality_; they always stand out amongst the work of other artists, however great. The chief cause of this is hard to define, but I should say that it is that they almost invariably possess a certain quality of imaginativeness, of what is termed ‘poetry.’ No matter how simple was his subject, he instinctively saw it from its most beautiful, its most romantic side. If it had little or no beauty or romance of its own, he would still throw an indefinable charm round it by some gleam of light, some veiling mist, some far-away distance, some alluring sense of mystery, of ‘infinity.’ And Turner was a true poet, although he had little enough of the look or the manners of one. Throughout his life he was a reader and a voluminous writer of poetry, but his want of education debarred him from ever expressing himself coherently in verse. The same cause, together with his lack of a sense of humour, interfered also with the perfect expression of his art, especially in his classical and religious pictures, and prevented him from seeing what was incongruous or at times unpleasing in them. But only a poet deep-down could have won as he did from Nature her most intimate secrets; could so have caught and so inimitably have portrayed her every mood and charm. And it is this impress of his deep love for the beauty and the grandeur of Nature--a love as strong as Wordsworth’s, as intense as Shelley’s--which is perhaps the greatest cause of the enduring attractiveness of Turner’s work. Without it, he would never have toiled as he did all his life, from dawn to dark, year in and year out, observing and recording in those nineteen thousand studies every kind of natural scenery, every changing contour of mist and cloud, every differing form and structure of tree, every movement or reflection in water, every transient effect of light, storm, wind or weather.