The clue, then, to the nature of Turner’s later manner of expression is to be found in the character not of his optical sensations but of his thought, or in other words, upon the mode in which his intelligent self reacted upon the immediate data of sense-perception. By the time he had reached the period with which we are now concerned, he had lost much of his interest in the material world. He cared no longer for the strength and weight, the toughness and tang of material; that delight in the solidity of real objects which gives such a manly gusto to his early sea-pieces, is now altogether absent from his work. He cares no longer for the company of men, or for their avocations or joys and sorrows. He is now a lonely old man, with his thoughts mainly centred upon himself, upon his artistic genius, his artistic fame, and the visions of future pictures by which his genius was to continue to manifest itself, and by which his fame was to be increased or sustained. We have then to think of Turner as a solitary dreamer of dreams, with a professional interest in the capacity of these dreams to startle a rather stupid public. If we want to enter intimately into the spiritual and emotional content of his dreams we have only to turn to the contemporary works of the poets. In pictures like ‘The Fountain of Indolence,’ the ‘Agrippina’ and those I have mentioned above, we see how deeply impressed his mind had become with the ideals of current Romantic poetry; the true Byronic disgust with himself and vague emotions of the infinite, the desire to ‘steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the universe, and feel What I can ne’er express.’ There is no doubt that these obscure emotions and vague reveries can only be adequately expressed in one particular way. They defy embodiment in clear-cut determinate forms. They demand a style as indeterminate, as vaguely suggestive, as inarticulate as the loose-knit dreams which are calling for embodiment. This, then, I take to be the proper explanation of the vagueness of Turner’s later manner: It is not that he saw the world indistinctly, but that his ideas were incapable of definition; it is not that his eyes were newly opened to the vapours and mists of the physical world, but that his own thoughts were confused and his emotions, in spite of their strength, were incoherent and inarticulate. * * * * *