The ‘Straw-yard,’ the second pastoral subject in the ‘Liber,’ strikes me as a cross between a Gainsborough and a Teniers. Gainsborough’s influence is noticeable in the landscape, while the ungainly horses, the awkward men and clumsy farm implements are in the spirit of Dutch realism. These hints of the plainness and toughness of the marine subjects suggest what Turner will do when he feels equally at home in rural subjects, but at present we have merely two incompatible points of view in arbitrary juxtaposition. ‘Pembury Mill,’ the third pastoral, is rather more homogeneous in intention. It is a scene of cheerful industry and plenty, the noise of the millstone mingling with the cooing of pigeons, and lush leaves growing beside the water-wheel. It is a pretty subject, while no conscious attempts have been made to prettify or blink the actual facts of the case. The ‘Farm-Yard with the Cock’ (R. 17) still belongs to the eighteenth-century idyll. It is a pleasing combination of Gainsborough and Morland, or perhaps an echo of Wheatley. In the ‘Juvenile Tricks’ (R. 22)[15] Turner’s bent towards homely realism is clearly marked, but we do not get definitively away from the eighteenth century till we come to the ‘Windmill and Lock’ (R. 27).[16] Here we are in an entirely different world from that of Arcadian poetry. We have now put away childish things, and are face to face with the big real world in which man earns his bread with the sweat of his brow; in which men and women labour and sin, sorrow and repent. It is indeed the real world, the world of common perception and common experience, yet transfigured with the solemn glow of the truest and profoundest poetry. The engraving of the ‘Windmill and Lock’ was published in June, 1811, but the picture and drawing were made some time before this date. In the part of the ‘Liber’ published immediately before the one which contained this plate, there was a plate of ‘Hind Head Hill’ (R. 25), which bears the date of 1st January, 1811. This subject was sketched in November 1807. It is therefore probable that the two drawings were made soon afterwards, let us say in 1808. The period of the inception of ‘Hind Head Hill,’ then, marks the commencement of the era of Turner’s deeper and more solemn conception of the poetry of rural life. This subject itself, though classified in the ‘Liber’ as ‘mountainous,’ belongs to all intents and purposes to the phase of art which we are now studying. The bare hills dotted with sheep, with the murderer’s corpse creaking upon the distant gibbet, are quite in harmony with the mood of Wordsworth’s _Lyrical Ballads_. In the same sketch-book are also the first ideas of no less than three other ‘Liber’ subjects, all conceived in the same mood of spiritual exaltation, and all sketched during the same journey from Portsmouth to London.