for us is to see that Turner’s art has passed from one stage of growth to another, and to realise for ourselves as best we can the nature of this progression. To me it seems clear that the line of Turner’s personal development is following roughly the line upon which the artistic faculty of mankind has developed; that the transition from topography to the stage we have now entered upon coincides in part with the movement from Classic to Romantic art, from the art which is in bondage to the world of external reality, to the art which moves and has its being in the inner world of our ideas and feelings. The ‘Llandaff’ and ‘Lincoln’ belong to the classic (or the pseudo-classic, if you will) art of the eighteenth century, while the ‘Ewenny’ inaugurates the Romantic art of the nineteenth century. On its technical side the change is from form to tone, from a system of predominantly unemotional space-determinations to a medium which is more immediately in contact with the inward feeling of all self-conscious beings. In moving from the Augustan point of view towards the Romantic, Turner was but walking in an already well-beaten track. During the last half-century the influence of Milton had been growing, the taste for the gloomy, the mysterious and the picturesque had found expression in Young’s _Night Thoughts_, in Gray’s _Elegy_, in Walpole’s _Castle of Otranto_, and had found critical exponents in Warton’s _History of English Poetry_, and in Burke’s Essay _On the Sublime and Beautiful_, (1756). Dr. Percy’s _Reliques_ had found many readers and admirers, and Macpherson’s _Ossian_ had stirred the enthusiasm of Europe. In painting Richard Wilson and De Loutherbourg had struck the same note of gloomy grandeur. Now the essence of this kind of art--the Sublime--is not merely to strike the spectator dumb with amazement or terror, but also to make him feel that man’s moral freedom is superior to the most terrible forces of Nature.[8] The mere representation of the fearful and terrible sights of inorganic nature is therefore not by itself enough to evoke a feeling of the sublime; before he can do this the artist must also excite in the spectator the consciousness of his power to overcome or resist such objects. It is therefore a purely subjective feeling that the artist has to represent, though this feeling is directed towards or centred round a certain definite series of objects. But these objects as coloured with the strength and resolution of the heroic mood--the mood of Kant’s _animi strenui_[9]--cannot properly be said to exist as natural objects. The real subject of the artist’s work is therefore, strictly speaking, the invisible and the intangible, a mere mood of the soul, an attitude of our own mind towards certain objects of thought.