The ‘Tynemouth’ design, published in 1831, is on a higher plane of imaginative creation than the ‘Stamford’ subject, yet it was built up in just the same way from a sketch made at the same time on another leaf of the same sketch-book. The ‘Stamford’ design shows Turner struggling valiantly against the absence of any very pressing inspiration, and emerging with credit from the ordeal; the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing, on the other hand, shows that his youthful and thirty-year old topographical sketch had served to set his imagination aflame with all the urgency of a recent personal experience. The vision conjured up by what I can only call the potential or possible associations of a rocky coast had so much completeness, so much innate driving force, that Turner had no need to resort to the purely external and arbitrary tricks of composition which had proved such valuable auxiliaries in the ‘Stamford’ drawing. In the case of the ‘Stamford’ subject, we might almost say that the pictorial equivalent of the rhyme and metre had suggested the sense; in the case of the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing the idea itself is so vivid that it creates its own lilt and harmony. In looking through a number of Turner’s drawings the hasty observer--especially should he be a professional student eager to pick up useful knowledge--is inclined to jump to the conclusion that the important thing about rocks and mountains is to be high, and that when the height of the most prominent buildings, especially if they happen to be in ruins, has been increased three or fourfold, all the duties of the imaginative designer have been attended to. In the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing we see how free Turner is from the constraint of any such ready-made and purely external rules of design. He has here deliberately lowered the apparent height of his buildings and cliffs, and, if we examine the matter carefully, we see that he has done this not at the dictates of a passing whim or fancy, but because the heart of the matter--the so-called ‘subject,’ that vague, intangible, elusive something which seems to sit in the centre of the dynamical idea and pump blood and life into every outlying portion of the organism, and tyrannises so beneficently over the structure and function of each part of the design--because this heart of the matter would clearly have it so.