1 1 4 THE DOWNS 



ways of Channel traffic bringing the scene into a 

 sympathy with life. If you seek for animation in the 

 foreground though before a cliff so bold and a sea 

 so limitless you scarcely care to occupy yourself with 

 trifles you have it in those Cornish choughs that 

 float about the rock face far below, rising and sinking 

 in ceaseless and successless efforts to find clinging place 

 on its surface. For a pendant to this picture, and one 

 not less attractive in its way, come back when the raw 

 sea fog that steeps everything below in a briny vapour, 

 is making a luxury of the exercise that sends your 

 blood coursing through your veins. Every muscle 

 comes in for more than its fair share of work, thanks 

 to the slippery, sloppy turf, and every particle of film 

 is cleared from your eye. The sheep are grazing 

 in joyless stolidity as matter of business ; their 

 shepherd wrapped in his soaking capote is cowering 

 down behind a dripping furze bush ; his shaggy, 

 queer-bred dog draws down the curling corners of 

 his jowl, and tucks his stump of a tail away between 

 his trembling legs. Heavy grey wreaths of cloud are 

 clinging to the cliff ; the deep leaden grey of the sea 

 shades away in a light grey haze, and the grey tide 

 comes rolling in with sullen splash on the strip of 

 beach beneath. But the neutral tints are brightened 

 inimitably by the gleaming crests of the breakers at 

 sea, and the white curl of the rollers that are rattling 

 in on the red shingle you see faintly shimmering below. 

 Turner would have revelled in the effects, and probably 

 before, in his latest eccentricities of style, he left so very 



