These inimitable and delightful sketches have been very widely admired, as they deserve to be, but they have also been praised, somewhat perversely as it seems to me, for their truth and accuracy of representation. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, these sketches “are not, strictly speaking, sketches from nature; but plans or designs of pictures which Turner, if he had had time, would have made of each place. They indicate, therefore, a perfectly formed conception of the finished picture; and they are of exactly the same value as memoranda would be, if made by Turner’s own hand, of pictures of his not in our possession. They are just to be regarded as quick descriptions or reminiscences of noble pictures.” Mr. Ruskin is also unquestionably correct when he adds “that nothing but the pencilling in them was done on the spot, and not always that. Turner used to walk about a town with a roll of thin paper in his pocket, and make a few scratches upon a sheet or two of it, which were so much shorthand indication of all he wished to remember. When he got to his inn in the evening, he completed the pencilling rapidly, and added as much colour as was needed to record his plan of the picture” (“Ruskin on Pictures,” pp. 86-7). It is not my intention now to dwell upon the beauty of these incomparable drawings, on their passionate intensity and emotional sincerity, their nervous eloquence and elusive suggestiveness. The point I wish to insist on at present is that they must not be regarded as attempts to reproduce or imitate the merely superficial qualities of physical nature, as attempts to give an accurate representation of effects of air or light, or of the shapes and forms of mountain, water or cloud. The artist is not immersed in the definite character of physical objects. He seems to feel that as a spiritual and self-conscious being he is something higher than the merely natural, and it is as modes of expression of human freedom and self-consciousness that these lyrical fragments must be regarded.