After what has gone before I do not think I need say much to combat the opinion that these pictures are simply reproductions of actual scenes. Their relation to the actual sights of nature is exactly the same as that between the two ‘Liber’ designs we have just examined and the sketches upon which they were based. In the designs, and in these pictures, there is indeed a wealth of subtle and penetrating observation of natural forms, habits, and colours, but this material is never there simply for its own sake. These colours and forms of natural beauty are the elements of which the artist’s language is compounded, the pictorial equivalent of the names of natural objects in the verse of a great poet. To fix one’s attention on these factors in the whole complex structure of such works as ‘A Frosty Morning’ and ‘Windsor,’ and to say that these fragments of meaning are all that they contain, seems to me as inexcusable as it would be to isolate the nouns in a poem, and to insist that we must ignore that play of thought and feeling around this common basis in which the real value of even the simplest poem consists. We can, of course, always stop short in our understanding of any statement, and the temptation is very great to stop short at some superficial characteristic in such a highly complex individuality as a work of modern art. In the case of the two pictures with which we are now concerned, these characteristics happen to be not only superficial and obvious, but they happen also to be easily nameable, whereas the complete ideational and emotional structure of the whole work is very far from being easily named or described. Yet it is just this particular and special emotional and ideational whole which constitutes the very being of the work of art, and which alone gives it value. It is because modern art criticism has seized with such avidity upon the primitive sense-factor in pictorial language, and has insisted with so much energy that the art cannot or ought not to attempt any kind of ideational articulation, that it has failed to do justice to this phase of Turner’s art. To call these pictures, then, imitations or reproductions of natural scenes is not altogether inaccurate. They are this, but at the same time they are so much more. The forms and colours of nature are there, but they are superseded and sublimated in exactly the way that the particular events described in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal are superseded and sublimated in the poems [Illustration: _PLATE XXX_ LONDON, FROM GREENWICH PARK PENCIL. ABOUT 1809] [Illustration: _PLATE XXXI_ PETWORTH HOUSE, FROM THE LAKE PENCIL. ABOUT 1809]