Another little book, labelled ‘Boats. Ice,’ shows that Turner was no mere fair weather sailor. The sketches were evidently made during a severe winter. The book starts off with several lurid sunsets. On page 9 we see some boatmen on their barges, a church, probably Gravesend Church, in the distance. The sun has disappeared behind a bank of clouds. These have the word ‘grey’ scribbled over them. Over a few hurried lines of pencil radiating from a centre behind these clouds are the suggestive words ‘Fire and Blood.’ On page 12, we have a stretch of river with a distant group of trees on the left looming through the fog. The river is strewn with fragments of ice. On the right a single boat is visible, its tall mast and stays standing out boldly against the sky. Above, the upper part of the sun’s face is just appearing through the clouds. This slight, sensitive sketch is helped out for the artist--though for the imaginative spectator it hardly needs such help, so eloquent is it--by scribbled notes of colour; ‘Boat ... yellow,’ the water in the foreground, ‘Greenish Black in Shadows. Ice white and grey.’ On the next page we find two barges with brittle fragments of ice hanging round them. On page 16, there is a barge moored beside what seems to be a huge iceberg, with two figures on it, though it may only be a rocky shore distorted by snow and ice into its fantastic appearance. But the sketch on the next page looks emphatically like an iceberg. The following sketch is here reproduced (Plate XXIV.), so the reader may judge for himself what it is. To me it looks like floating icebergs, the foremost one containing a wrecked vessel embedded in its surface. This page was cut out by Mr. Ruskin and exhibited at Oxford with the title, ‘The Inscrutable.’ Turner has summed up these experiences of his in a group of absolutely unrivalled sea-pieces. Pictures like Mr. F. H. Fawkes’s ‘Pilot hailing a Whitstable Hoy,’ Mr. G. J. Gould’s ‘The Nore,’ Mr. P. A. B. Widener’s ‘Meeting of the Thames and Medway,’ and Lady Wantage’s ‘Sheerness,’ seem to me beyond all question the most glorious pictures of the sea ever painted. The finest Dutch pictures of this kind, with all their admirable qualities, do not seem ever to get beyond a certain prosaic outlook. This matter-of-fact effect is enhanced by--if it is not altogether due to [Illustration: _PLATE XXIV_ ‘THE INSCRUTABLE” PENCIL. ABOUT 1808]