But sketches that might be mere hack-work
became under his fingers magically lovely. We may follow him to many
a corner of England, Wales, and Scotland, sketching architecture,
mountain, moor, mists, and lakes. His earliest sketches are rather
stiff and precise. But he developed with rapidity, and soon painted
them in tones of blue and grey, so soft that the stars and the horizons
merge into one lovely indefiniteness. Not till much later is there
a touch of brighter colour in them such as fires the 'Temeraire,' but
in all there is the same spirit of poetry. Turner longed to be a poet,
although he could hardly write a correct sentence even in prose. But
he was a poet in his outlook upon life; he seldom painted a scene exactly
as he saw it, but transfused it by an imaginative touch into what on
rare occasions, with perfect conjuncture of mist and weather, it might
possibly become. He gave extra height to church spires, or made
precipices steeper than they were, thus to render the impression of
the place more explicit than by strict copying of the facts. Yet he
could be minutely accurate in his rendering of all effects of sky,
cloud, and atmosphere when he chose.
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