The change is due entirely to the execution. The line which defines the contours of the chief objects has lost its listlessness. It is now instinct with intention. Everywhere it hurries along, building up the design as a whole while defining the parts. The compulsion of the whole makes itself felt in every detail. It is certainly difficult to put into words the difference between the two versions, but I believe every one who will take the trouble to compare them carefully will be sure to feel it. In the two works there is an actual difference in the quality of the artist’s stream of consciousness, and the difference makes itself felt in the workmanship, though, in all probability, he himself was quite unaware of the difference in his frame of mind, and regarded the etching as simply a mechanical process of transference from one medium to another. Yet from a psychological point of view, the impulsion of his mind was in each case in a contrary direction. In the drawing the scene as a whole was being laboriously invoked piecemeal, a collection of objects was being formed into a sum total; in the etching the subject as a whole is a real and living thing, guiding the artist’s hand and moulding all the details into kinship with itself. The whole now feels that certain of its parts require adjustment, _i.e._ demand to be brought into more intimate cohesion with the general purpose. The contrast between the rigidity of the dead branches of the willow on the right, and the springiness of the living branches nearer the foreground, calls out for clearer and [Illustration: _PLATE XXXVI_ SCENE ON THE FRENCH COAST SEPIA. ABOUT 1806] [Illustration: _PLATE XXXVII_ SCENE ON THE FRENCH COAST GENERALLY KNOWN AS “FLINT CASTLE: SMUGGLERS” ETCHING, WASHED WITH SEPIA. ABOUT 1807] more emphatic statement. The dance and sweep of the foliage, the bending bridge, the falling bank, require steadying by a bolder assertion of the straight horizontal line of the distant hills. The soft and rounded undulations of the tree-tops, running right across the upper part of the drawing, give a somewhat featureless though amiable character to it; in the etching, greater prominence is given to the harsher lines of the rigid white wall of the distant cottage and its sloping roof, as well as to the supports and planks of the rustic bridge. In this way, without altering the position of a single part of the design, or introducing any new matter, the whole is transformed; instead of a mere collection of parts, related to each other by a kind of chance or indifferent contiguity, we have now a definite whole, fused through and through into conceptual and emotional unity. The objects before our eyes have ceased to be merely indifferent and external facts; they have now become elements or members of a richly coloured whole of thought and feeling.