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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Frondes Agrestes, by John Ruskin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Frondes Agrestes
+       Readings in 'Modern Painters'
+
+Author: John Ruskin
+
+Release Date: January 22, 2010 [EBook #31045]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRONDES AGRESTES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Chandra Friend and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  FRONDES AGRESTES.
+
+  READINGS IN 'MODERN PAINTERS.'
+
+  CHOSEN AT HER PLEASURE,
+  BY THE AUTHOR'S FRIEND,
+  THE YOUNGER LADY OF THE THWAITE,
+  CONISTON.
+
+  'Spargit agrestes tibi silva frondes.'
+
+  Thirty-Eighth Thousand.
+
+  London: George Allen, 156, Charing Cross Road. 1902.
+
+  Printed By Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
+  At the Ballantyne Press
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+I have been often asked to republish the first book of mine which the
+public noticed, and which, hitherto, remains their favourite, in a
+more easily attainable form than that of its existing editions. I am,
+however, resolved never to republish the book as a whole; some parts
+of it being, by the established fame of Turner, rendered unnecessary;
+and others having been always useless, in their praise of excellence
+which the public will never give the labour necessary to discern. But,
+finding lately that one of my dearest friends, who, in advanced age,
+retains the cheerfulness and easily delighted temper of bright youth,
+had written out, for her own pleasure, a large number of passages from
+'Modern Painters,' it seemed to me certain that what such a person
+felt to be useful to herself, could not but be useful also to a class
+of readers whom I much desired to please, and who would sometimes
+enjoy, in my early writings, what I never should myself have offered
+them. I asked my friend, therefore, to add to her own already chosen
+series, any other passages she thought likely to be of permanent
+interest to general readers; and I have printed her selections in
+absolute submission to her judgment, merely arranging the pieces she
+sent me in the order which seemed most convenient for the reciprocal
+bearing of their fragmentary meanings, and adding here and there an
+explanatory note; or, it may be, a deprecatory one, in cases where my
+mind had changed. That she did me the grace to write every word with
+her own hands, adds, in my eyes, and will, I trust, in the readers'
+also, to the possible claims of the little book on their sympathy; and
+although I hope to publish some of the scientific and technical
+portions of the original volumes in my own large editions, the
+selections here made by my friend under her quiet woods at
+Coniston--the Unter-Walden of England--will, I doubt not, bring within
+better reach of many readers, for whom I am not now able myself to
+judge or choose, such service as the book was ever capable of
+rendering, in the illustration of the powers of nature, and
+intercession for her now too often despised and broken peace.
+
+Herne Hill,
+
+  5th December, 1874.
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS.
+
+                                                    PAGE
+  PREFACE                                              V
+
+  SECTION I.    PRINCIPLES OF ART                      1
+
+          II.   POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION       10
+
+          III.  ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY                 35
+
+          IV.       "        STREAMS AND SEA          64
+
+          V.        "        MOUNTAINS                74
+
+          VI.       "        STONES                  107
+
+          VII.      "        PLANTS AND FLOWERS      115
+
+          VIII. EDUCATION                            140
+
+          IX.   MORALITIES                           151
+
+
+
+
+FRONDES AGRESTES.
+
+
+
+
+SECTION I.
+
+PRINCIPLES OF ART.
+
+
+1. Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible
+pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to our moral
+nature in its purity and perfection; but why we receive pleasure from
+some forms and colours, and not from others, is no more to be asked or
+answered than why we like sugar and dislike wormwood.
+
+
+2. The temper by which right taste is formed is characteristically
+patient. It dwells upon what is submitted to it. It does not trample
+upon it,--lest it should be pearls, even though it look like husks. It
+is good ground, penetrable, retentive; it does not send up thorns of
+unkind thoughts, to choke the weak seed; it is hungry and thirsty too,
+and drinks all the dew that falls on it. It is an honest and good
+heart, that shows no too ready springing before the sun be up, but
+fails not afterwards; it is distrustful of itself, so as to be ready
+to believe and to try all things; and yet so trustful of itself, that
+it will neither quit what it has tried, nor take anything without
+trying. And the pleasure which it has in things that it finds true and
+good, is so great, that it cannot possibly be led aside by any tricks
+of fashion, or diseases of vanity; it cannot be cramped in its
+conclusions by partialities and hypocrisies; its visions and its
+delights are too penetrating,--too living,--for any whitewashed object
+or shallow fountain long to endure or supply. It clasps all that it
+loves so hard that it crushes it if it be hollow.
+
+
+3. It is the common consent of men that whatever branch of any pursuit
+ministers to the bodily comforts, and regards material uses, is
+ignoble, and whatever part is addressed to the mind only, is noble;
+and that geology does better in reclothing dry bones and revealing
+lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron;
+astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven, than in
+teaching navigation; botany better in displaying structure than in
+expressing juices; surgery better in investigating organization than
+in setting limbs.--Only it is ordained that, for our encouragement,
+every step we make in the more exalted range of science adds something
+also to its practical applicabilities; that all the great phenomena of
+nature, the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, by us
+partly, as it reveals to farther vision the being and the glory of Him
+in whom they rejoice and we live, dispense yet such kind influences
+and so much of material blessing as to be joyfully felt by all
+inferior creatures, and to be desired by them with such single desire
+as the imperfection of their nature may admit; that the strong
+torrents, which, in their own gladness, fill the hills with hollow
+thunder, and the vales with winding light, have yet their bounden
+charge of field to feed, and barge to bear; that the fierce flames to
+which the Alp owes its upheaval and the volcano its terror, temper for
+us the metal vein, and warm the quickening spring; and that for our
+incitement, I say, not our reward,--for knowledge is its own
+reward,--herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and
+stars their times.
+
+
+4. Had it been ordained by the Almighty[1] that the highest pleasures
+of sight should be those of most difficult attainment, and that to
+arrive at them it should be necessary to accumulate gilded palaces,
+tower over tower, and pile artificial mountains around insinuated
+lakes, there would never have been a direct contradiction between the
+unselfish duties and the inherent desires of every individual. But no
+such contradiction exists in the system of Divine Providence; which,
+leaving it open to us, if we will, as creatures in probation, to abuse
+this sense like every other, and pamper it with selfish and
+thoughtless vanities, as we pamper the palate with deadly meats, until
+the appetite of tasteful cruelty is lost in its sickened satiety,
+incapable of pleasure unless, Caligula like, it concentrates the
+labour of a million of lives into the sensation of an hour,--leaves it
+also open to us, by humble and loving ways, to make ourselves
+susceptible of deep delight, which shall not separate us from our
+fellows, nor require the sacrifice of any duty or occupation, but
+which shall bind us closer to men and to God, and be with us always,
+harmonized with every action, consistent with every claim, unchanging
+and eternal.
+
+[1] The reader must observe, that having been thoroughly disciplined in
+the Evangelical schools, I supposed myself, at four-and-twenty, to know
+all about the ordinances of the Almighty. Nevertheless, the practical
+contents of the sentence are good; if only they are intelligible, which
+I doubt.
+
+
+5. A great Idealist never can be egotistic. The whole of his power
+depends upon his losing sight and feeling of his own existence, and
+becoming a mere witness and mirror of truth, and a scribe of
+visions,--always passive in sight, passive in utterance, lamenting
+continually that he cannot completely reflect nor clearly utter all he
+has seen,--not by any means a proud state for a man to be in. But the
+man who has no invention is always setting things in order,[2] and
+putting the world to rights, and mending, and beautifying, and pluming
+himself on his doings, as supreme in all ways.
+
+[2] I am now a comic illustration of this sentence, myself. I have not a
+ray of invention in all my brains; but am intensely rational and
+orderly, and have resolutely begun to set the world to rights.
+
+
+6. So far as education does indeed tend to make the senses delicate,
+and the perceptions accurate, and thus enables people to be pleased
+with quiet instead of gaudy colour, and with graceful instead of
+coarse form; and by long acquaintance with the best things, to discern
+quickly what is fine from what is common--so far acquired taste is an
+honourable faculty, and it is true praise of anything to say it is "in
+good taste." But,[3] so far as this higher education has a tendency to
+narrow the sympathies and harden the heart, diminishing the interest
+of all beautiful things by familiarity, until even what is best can
+hardly please, and what is brightest hardly entertain,--so far as it
+fosters pride, and leads men to found the pleasure they take in
+anything, not on the worthiness of the thing, but on the degree in
+which it indicates some greatness of their own, (as people build
+marble porticoes, and inlay marble floors, not so much because they
+like the colours of marble, or find it pleasant to the foot, as
+because such porches and floors are costly, and separated in all human
+eyes from plain entrances of stone and timber);--so far as it leads
+people to prefer gracefulness of dress, manner, and aspect, to value
+of substance and heart, liking a well-_said_ thing better than a true
+thing, and a well-trained manner better than a sincere one, and a
+delicately-formed face better than a good-natured one,--and in all
+other ways and things setting custom and semblance above everlasting
+truth;--so far, finally, as it induces a sense of inherent distinction
+between class and class, and causes everything to be more or less
+despised which has no social rank, so that the affection, pleasure,
+and grief of a clown are looked upon as of no interest compared with
+the affection and grief of a well-bred man;--just so far, in all these
+several ways, the feeling induced by what is called "a liberal
+education" is utterly adverse to the understanding of noble art.
+
+[3] Nobody need begin this second volume sentence unless they are
+breathed like the Graeme:--
+
+"Right up Ben Ledi could he press, And not a sob his toil confess."
+
+
+7. He who habituates himself in his daily life to seek for the stern
+facts in whatever he hears or sees, will have these facts again
+brought before him by the involuntary imaginative power, in their
+noblest associations; and he who seeks for frivolities and fallacies,
+will have frivolities and fallacies again presented to him in his
+dreams.[4]
+
+[4] Very good. Few people have any idea how much more important the
+government of the mind is, than the force of its exertion. Nearly all
+the world flog their horses, without ever looking where they are going.
+
+
+8. All the histories of the Bible are yet waiting to be painted. Moses
+has never been painted; Elijah never; David never (except as a mere
+ruddy stripling); Deborah never; Gideon never; Isaiah never.[5] What
+single example does the reader remember of painting which suggested so
+much as the faintest shadow of their deeds? Strong men in armour, or
+aged men with flowing beards, he _may_ remember, who, when he looked
+at his Louvre or Uffizi catalogue, he found were intended to stand for
+David, or Moses. But does he suppose that, if these pictures had
+suggested to him the feeblest image of the presence of such men, he
+would have passed on, as he assuredly did, to the next picture,
+representing, doubtless, Diana and Actaeon, or Cupid and the Graces, or
+a gambling quarrel in a pothouse--with no sense of pain or surprise?
+Let him meditate over the matter, and he will find ultimately that
+what I say is true, and that religious art at once complete and
+sincere never yet has existed.
+
+[5] I knew nothing, when I wrote this passage, of Luini, Filippo Lippi,
+or Sandro Botticelli; and had not capacity to enter into the deeper
+feelings, even of the men whom I was chiefly studying,--Tintoret and Fra
+Angelico. But the British public is at present as little acquainted with
+the greater Florentines as I was then, and the passage, for _them_,
+remains true.
+
+
+
+
+SECTION II.
+
+POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION.
+
+
+9. What are the legitimate uses of the imagination,--that is to say,
+of the power of perceiving, or conceiving with the mind, things which
+cannot be perceived by the senses? Its first and noblest use is,[6] to
+enable us to bring sensibly to our sight the things which are recorded
+as belonging to our future state, or invisibly surrounding us in this.
+It is given us, that we may imagine the cloud of witnesses, in heaven,
+and earth, and sea, as if they were now present,--the souls of the
+righteous waiting for us; that we may conceive the great army of the
+inhabitants of heaven, and discover among them those whom we most
+desire to be with for ever; that we may be able to vision forth the
+ministry of angels beside us, and see the chariots of fire on the
+mountains that gird us round; but, above all, to call up the scenes
+and facts in which we are commanded to believe, and be present, as if
+in the body, at every recorded event of the history of the Redeemer.
+Its second and ordinary use is, to empower us to traverse the scenes
+of all other history, and to force the facts to become again visible,
+so as to make upon us the same impression which they would have made
+if we had witnessed them; and, in the minor necessities of life, to
+enable us, out of any present good, to gather the utmost measure of
+enjoyment, by investing it with happy associations, and, in any
+present evil, to lighten it, by summoning back the images of other
+hours; and also to give to all mental truths some visible type, in
+allegory, simile, or personification, which shall most deeply enforce
+them; and finally, when the mind is utterly outwearied, to refresh it
+with such innocent play as shall be most in harmony with the
+suggestive voices of natural things, permitting it to possess living
+companionship, instead of silent beauty, and create for itself fairies
+in the grass, and naiads in the wave.
+
+[6] I should be glad if the reader who is interested in the question
+here raised, would read, as illustrative of the subsequent statement,
+the account of Tintoret's 'Paradise,' in the close of my Oxford lecture
+on Michael Angelo and Tintoret, which I have printed separately to make
+it generally accessible.
+
+
+10. Yet, because we thus reverence the power and art of imagination,
+let none of us despise the power and art of memory.
+
+Let the reader consider seriously what he would give at any moment to
+have the power of arresting the fairest scenes, those which so often
+rise before him only to vanish; to stay the cloud in its fading, the
+leaf in its trembling, and the shadows in their changing; to bid the
+fitful foam be fixed upon the river, and the ripples be everlasting
+upon the lake; and then to bear away with him no darkness or feeble
+sun-stain, (though even that is beautiful,) but a counterfeit which
+should seem no counterfeit--the true and perfect image of life indeed.
+Or rather, (for the full majesty of such a power is not thus
+sufficiently expressed,) let him consider that it would be in effect
+nothing less than a capacity of transporting himself at any moment
+into any scene--a gift as great as can be possessed by a disembodied
+spirit; and suppose, also, this necromancy embracing not only the
+present but the past, and enabling us seemingly to enter into the very
+bodily presence of men long since gathered to the dust; to behold them
+in act as they lived; but, with greater privilege than ever was
+granted to the companions of those transient acts of life, to see them
+fastened at our will in the gesture and expression of an instant, and
+stayed on the eve of some great deed, in immortality of burning
+purpose.--Conceive, so far as is possible, such power as this, and
+then say whether the art which conferred it is to be spoken lightly
+of, or whether we should not rather reverence, as half-divine, a gift
+which would go so far as to raise us into the rank, and invest us with
+the felicities, of angels.[7]
+
+[7] Passage written in opposition to the vulgar notion that the 'mere
+imitation' of Nature is easy, and useless.
+
+
+11. I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I
+do not mean by humility, doubt of his own power, or hesitation of
+speaking his opinions; but a right understanding of the relation
+between what _he_ can do and say, and the rest of the world's sayings
+and doings. All great men not only know their business, but usually
+know that they know it; and are not only right in their main opinions,
+but they usually know that they are right in them; only they do not
+think much of themselves on that account. Arnolfo knows he can build a
+good dome at Florence; Albert Durer writes calmly to one who has found
+fault with his work,--"It cannot be better done;" Sir Isaac Newton
+knows that he has worked out a problem or two that would have puzzled
+anybody else; only they do not expect their fellow-men, therefore, to
+fall down and worship them. They have a curious under-sense of
+powerlessness, feeling that the greatness is not _in_ them, but
+_through_ them--that they could not do or be anything else than God
+made them; and they see something divine and God-made in every other
+man they meet, and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
+
+
+12. As far as I can observe, it is a constant law, that the greatest
+men, whether poets or historians, live entirely in their own age, and
+the greatest fruits of their work are gathered out of their own age.
+Dante paints Italy in the thirteenth century; Chaucer, England in the
+fourteenth; Masaccio, Florence in the fifteenth; Tintoret, Venice in
+the sixteenth; all of them utterly regardless of anachronism and minor
+error of every kind, but getting always vital truth out of the vital
+present. If it be said that Shakespeare wrote perfect historical plays
+on subjects belonging to the preceding centuries, I answer that they
+_are_ perfect plays, just because there is no care about centuries in
+them, but a life which all men recognise for the human life of all
+time--and this it is, not because Shakespeare sought to give universal
+truth, but because painting, honestly and completely, from the men
+about him, he painted that human nature which is indeed constant
+enough,--a rogue in the fifteenth century being _at heart_ what a
+rogue is in the nineteenth, and was in the twelfth; and an honest or
+knightly man being in like manner very similar to other such at any
+other time. And the work of these great idealists is, therefore,
+always universal; not because it is not _portrait_, but because it is
+_complete_ portrait, down to the heart, which is the same in all ages;
+and the work of the mean idealists is _not_ universal, not because it
+is portrait, but because it is _half_ portrait--of the outside, the
+manners and the dress, not of the heart. Thus Tintoret and Shakespeare
+paint, both of them, simply Venetian and English nature, as they saw
+it in their time, down to the root; and it does for _all_ time; but as
+for any care to cast themselves into the particular ways and tones of
+thought, or custom, of past time in their historical work, you will
+find it in neither of them,[8] nor in any other perfectly great man
+that I know of.
+
+[8] What vestige of Egyptian character is there, for instance, in
+Cleopatra?--of Athenian in Theseus or Timon?--of old English in Imogen
+or Cordelia?--of old Scottish in Macbeth?--or even of mediaeval Italian
+in Petruchio, the Merchant of Venice, or Desdemona? And the Roman plays
+appear definitely Roman only because the strength of Rome was the
+eternal strength of the world,--pure family life, sustained by
+agriculture, and defended by simple and fearless manhood.
+
+
+13. I think it probable that many readers may be surprised at my
+calling Scott the great representative of the mind of the age of
+literature. Those who can perceive the intense penetrative depth of
+Wordsworth, and the exquisite finish and melodious power of Tennyson,
+may be offended at my placing in higher rank that poetry of careless
+glance and reckless rhyme in which Scott poured out the fancies of his
+youth; and those who are familiar with the subtle analysis of the
+French novelists, or who have in any wise submitted themselves to the
+influence of German philosophy, may be equally indignant at my
+ascribing a principality to Scott among the literary men of Europe, in
+an age which has produced De Balzac, and Goethe.[9]
+
+[9] I knew nothing of Goethe when I put him with Balzac; but the
+intolerable dulness which encumbers the depth of Wilhelm Meister, and
+the cruel reserve which conceals from all but the intensest readers the
+meaning of Faust, have made him, in a great degree, an evil influence in
+European literature; and Evil is always second-rate.
+
+But the mass of sentimental literature concerned with the analysis and
+description of emotion, headed by the poetry of Byron, is altogether
+of lower rank than the literature which merely describes what it saw.
+The true seer feels as intensely as any one else; but he does not much
+describe his feelings. He tells you whom he met, and what they said;
+leaves you to make out, from that, what they feel, and what he feels,
+but goes into little detail. And, generally speaking, pathetic writing
+and careful explanation of passion are quite easy, compared with this
+plain recording of what people said, and did; or with the right
+invention of what they are likely to say and do; for this reason, that
+to invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a
+story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage
+concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what
+happens; which to do, requires a colossal intellect; but to describe a
+separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it
+oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that
+noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of
+somebody sitting on the other side of the table. Even, therefore,
+where this sentimental literature is first rate, as in passages of
+Byron, Tennyson, and Keats, it ought not to be ranked so high as the
+creative; and though perfection even in narrow fields is perhaps as
+rare as in the wider, and it may be as long before we have another "In
+Memoriam" as another "Guy Mannering," I unhesitatingly receive as a
+greater manifestation of power, the right invention of a few sentences
+spoken by Pleydell and Mannering across their supper-table, than the
+most tender and passionate melodies of the self-examining verse.
+
+
+14. Fancy plays like a squirrel in its circular prison, and is happy;
+but Imagination is a pilgrim on the earth--and her home is in heaven.
+Shut her from the fields of the celestial mountains, bear her from
+breathing their lofty, sun-warmed air; and we may as well turn upon
+her the last bolt of the Tower of Famine, and give the keys to the
+keeping of the wildest surge that washes Capraja and Gorgona.[10]
+
+[10] I leave this passage, as my friend has chosen it; but it is
+unintelligible without the contexts, which show how all the emotions
+described in the preceding passages of this section, are founded on
+trust in the beneficence and rule of an Omnipotent Spirit.
+
+
+15. In the highest poetry, there is no word so familiar, but a great
+man will "bring good out of it, or rather, it will bring good to him,
+and answer some end for which no other word would have done equally
+well. A common person, for instance, would be mightily puzzled to
+apply the word 'whelp' to anyone, with a view of flattering him. There
+is a certain freshness and energy in the term, which gives it
+agreeableness, but it seems difficult, at first hearing it, to use it
+complimentarily. If the person spoken of be a prince, the difficulty
+seems increased; and when farther he is at one and the same moment to
+be called a 'whelp' and contemplated as a hero, it seems that a common
+idealist might well be brought to a pause! But hear Shakespeare do
+it:--
+
+                    "Awake his warlike spirit,
+  And your great uncle's, Edward the Black Prince,
+  Who on the French ground played a tragedy,
+  Making defeat on the full power of France,
+  While his most mighty father on a hill
+  Stood smiling, to behold his lion's whelp
+  Forage in blood of French nobility."
+
+
+16. Although in all lovely nature there is, first, an excellent degree
+of simple beauty, addressed to the eye alone, yet often what impresses
+us most will form but a very small portion of that visible beauty.
+That beauty may, for instance, be composed of lovely flowers, and
+glittering streams, and blue sky and white clouds; and yet the thing
+that impresses us most, and which we should be sorriest to lose, may
+be a thin grey film on the extreme horizon, not so large, in the space
+of the scene it occupies, as a piece of gossamer on a near-at-hand
+bush, nor in any wise prettier to the eye than the gossamer; but
+because the gossamer is known by us for a little bit of spider's work,
+and the other grey film is known to mean a mountain ten thousand feet
+high, inhabited by a race of noble mountaineers, we are solemnly
+impressed by the aspect of it, and yet all the while the thoughts and
+knowledge which cause us to receive this impression are so obscure
+that we are not conscious of them.
+
+
+17. Examine the nature of your own emotion, (if you feel it,) at the
+sight of the Alps; and you find all the brightness of that emotion
+hanging, like dew on a gossamer, on a curious web of subtle fancy and
+imperfect knowledge. First you have a vague idea of its size, coupled
+with wonder at the work of the great Builder of its walls and
+foundations; then an apprehension of its eternity, a pathetic sense of
+its perpetualness, and your own transientness, as of the grass upon
+its side;--then, and in very sadness, a sense of strange companionship
+with past generations, in seeing what they saw. They did not see the
+clouds that are floating over your head, nor the cottage wall on the
+other side of the field, nor the road by which you are travelling. But
+they saw _that_. The wall of granite in the heavens was the same to
+them as to you. They have ceased to look upon it; you will soon cease
+to look also, and the granite wall will be for others. Then, mingled
+with these more solemn imaginations, come the understandings of the
+gifts and glories of the Alp;--the fancying forth of all the fountains
+that well from its rocky walls, and strong rivers that are born out of
+its ice, and of all the pleasant valleys that wind between its cliffs,
+and all the chalets that gleam among its clouds, and happy farmsteads
+couched upon its pastures; while, together with the thoughts of these,
+rise strange sympathies with all the unknown of human life, and
+happiness, and death, signified by that narrow white flame of the
+everlasting snow, seen so far in the morning sky. These images, and
+far more than these, lie at the root of the emotion which you feel at
+the sight of the Alps. You may not trace them in your heart, for there
+is a great deal more in your heart, both of evil and good, than you
+can ever trace; but they stir you and quicken you for all that.
+Assuredly, so far as you feel more at beholding the snowy mountain
+than any other object of the same sweet silvery grey, these are the
+kind of images which cause you to do so; and observe, these are
+nothing more than a greater apprehension of the _facts_ of the thing.
+We call the power 'Imagination,' because it imagines or conceives; but
+it is only noble imagination, if it imagines or conceives the _truth_.
+And according to the degree of knowledge possessed, and of sensibility
+to the pathetic or impressive character of the things known, will be
+the degree of this imaginative delight.
+
+
+18. So natural is it to the human heart to fix itself in hope rather
+than in present possession, and so subtle is the charm which the
+imagination casts over what is distant or denied, that there is often
+a more touching power in the scenes which contain far-away promises of
+something greater than themselves, than in those which exhaust the
+treasures and powers of nature in an unconquerable and excellent
+glory, leaving nothing more to be by fancy pictured or pursued. I do
+not know that there is a district in the world more calculated to
+illustrate this power of the expectant imagination than that which
+surrounds the city of Fribourg in Switzerland, extending from it
+towards Berne. It is of grey sandstone, considerably elevated, but
+presenting no object of striking interest to the passing traveller; so
+that as it is generally seen in the course of a hasty journey from the
+Bernese Alps to those of Savoy, it is rarely regarded with any other
+sensation than that of weariness, all the more painful because
+accompanied with reaction from the high excitement caused by the
+splendour of the Bernese Oberland. The traveller--foot-sore, feverish,
+and satiated with glacier and precipice,--lies back in the corner of
+the diligence, perceiving little more than that the road is winding
+and hilly, and the country through which it passes, cultivated and
+tame. Let him, however, only do this tame country the justice of
+staying in it a few days, until his mind has recovered its tone, and
+take one or two long walks through its fields, and he will have other
+thoughts of it. It is, as I said, an undulating district of grey
+sandstone, never attaining any considerable height, but having enough
+of the mountain spirit to throw itself into continual succession of
+bold slope and dale; elevated, also, just far enough above the sea to
+render the pine a frequent forest tree along its irregular ridges.
+Through this elevated tract the river cuts its way in a ravine some
+five or six hundred feet in depth, which winds for leagues between the
+gentle hills, unthought of until its edge is approached; and then,
+suddenly, through the boughs of the firs, the eye perceives, beneath,
+the green and gliding stream, and the broad walls of sandstone cliff
+that form its banks; hollowed out where the river leans against them,
+at its turns, into perilous over-hanging; and, on the other shore, at
+the same spots, leaving little breadths of meadow between them and the
+water, half overgrown with thicket, deserted in their sweetness,
+inaccessible from above, and rarely visited by any curious wanderers
+along the hardly traceable footpath which struggles for existence
+beneath the rocks. And there the river ripples and eddies and murmurs
+in an outer solitude. It is passing through a thickly peopled country;
+but never was a stream so lonely. The feeblest and most far-away
+torrent among the high hills has its companions; the goats browse
+beside it; and the traveller drinks from it, and passes over it with
+his staff; and the peasant traces a new channel for it down to his
+mill-wheel. But this stream has no companions; it flows on in an
+infinite seclusion, not secret, nor threatening, but a quietness of
+sweet daylight and open air--a broad space of tender and deep
+desolateness, drooped into repose out of the midst of human labour and
+life; the waves plashing lowly, with none to hear them; and the wild
+birds building in the boughs, with none to fray them away; and the
+soft, fragrant herbs rising and breathing and fading, with no hand to
+gather them;--and yet all bright and bare to the clouds above, and to
+the fresh fall of the passing sunshine and pure rain. But above the
+brows of these scarped cliffs, all is in an instant changed. A few
+steps only beyond the firs that stretch their branches, angular, and
+wild, and white, like forks of lightning, into the air of the
+ravine,--and we are in an arable country of the most perfect richness;
+the swathes of its corn glowing and burning from field to field: its
+pretty hamlets all vivid with fruitful orchards, and flowery garden,
+and goodly with steep-roofed storehouse and barn; its well-kept, hard,
+park-like roads rising and falling from hillside to hillside, or
+disappearing among brown banks of moss, and thickets of the wild
+raspberry and rose, or gleaming through lines of tall trees, half
+glade, half avenue, where the gate opens, or the gateless path turns
+trustedly aside, unhindered, into the garden of some statelier house,
+surrounded in rural pride with its golden hives, and carved granaries,
+and irregular domain of latticed and espaliered cottages, gladdening
+to look upon in their delicate homeliness--delicate, yet in some sort,
+rude; not like our English homes--trim, laborious, formal,
+irreproachable in comfort--but with a peculiar carelessness and
+largeness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed
+loveliness of their country. For there is an untamed strength even in
+all that soft and habitable land. It is indeed gilded with corn, and
+fragrant with deep grass, but it is not subdued to the plough or to
+the scythe. It gives at its own free will; it seems to have nothing
+wrested from it, nor conquered in it. It is not redeemed from
+desertness, but unrestrained in fruitfulness,--a generous land, bright
+with capricious plenty, and laughing from vale to vale in fitful
+fulness, kind and wild. Nor this without some sterner element mingled
+in the heart of it. For, along all its ridges stand the dark masses of
+innumerable pines,[11] taking no part in its gladness; asserting
+themselves for ever as fixed shadows, not to be pierced or banished
+even in the intensest sunlight; fallen flakes and fragments of the
+night, stayed in their solemn squares in the midst of all the rosy
+bendings of the orchard boughs and yellow effulgence of the harvest,
+and tracing themselves in black network and motionless fringes against
+the blanched blue of the horizon in its saintly clearness. And yet
+they do not sadden the landscape, but seem to have been set there
+chiefly to show how bright everything else is round them; and all the
+clouds look of pure silver, and all the air seems filled with a whiter
+and more living sunshine, where they are pierced by the sable points
+of the pines; and all the pastures look of more glowing green where
+they run up between the purple trunks; and the sweet field footpaths
+skirt the edges of the forest for the sake of its shade, sloping up
+and down about the slippery roots, and losing themselves every now and
+then hopelessly among the violets and ground-ivy and brown sheddings
+of the fibrous leaves, and at last plunging into some open aisle,
+where the light through the distant stems shows that there is a chance
+of coming out again on the other side; and coming out indeed in a
+little while from the scented darkness into the dazzling air and
+marvellous landscape, which stretches still farther and farther in new
+wilfulness of grove and garden, until at last the craggy mountains of
+the Simmenthal rise out of it, sharp into the rolling of the southern
+clouds.
+
+[11] Almost the only pleasure I have, myself, in rereading my old books,
+is my sense of having at least done justice to the pine. Compare the
+passage in this book, No. 47.
+
+
+19.[12] Although there are few districts of Northern Europe, however
+apparently dull or tame, in which I cannot find pleasure; though the
+whole of Northern France (except Champagne), dull as it seems to most
+travellers, is to me a perpetual paradise; and, putting Lincolnshire,
+Leicestershire, and one or two such other perfectly flat districts
+aside, there is not an English county which I should not find
+entertainment in exploring the cross-roads of, foot by foot,--yet all
+my best enjoyment would be owing to the imagination of the hills,
+colouring with their far-away memories every lowland stone and herb.
+The pleasant French coteau, green in the sunshine, delights me either
+by what real mountain character it has in itself, (for in extent and
+succession of promontory, the flanks of the French valleys have quite
+the sublimity of true mountain distances,) or by its broken ground and
+rugged steps among the vines, and rise of the leafage above against
+the blue sky, as it might rise at Vevay or Como. There is not a wave
+of the Seine, but is associated in my mind with the first rise of the
+sandstones and forest pines of Fontainebleau; and with the hope of the
+Alps, as one leaves Paris, with the horses' heads to the southwest,
+the morning sun flashing on the bright waves at Charenton. If there be
+no hope or association of this kind, and if I cannot deceive myself
+into fancying that perhaps at the next rise of the road there may be
+the film of a blue hill in the gleam of sky at the horizon, the
+landscape, however beautiful, produces in me even a kind of sickness
+and pain; and the whole view from Richmond Hill or Windsor
+Terrace,--nay, the gardens of Alcinous, with their perpetual
+summer--or of the Hesperides, (if they were flat, and not close to
+Atlas,) golden apples and all, I would give away in an instant, for
+one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of lady fern.
+
+[12] This, and the following passage, have nothing to do with the
+general statements in the book. They occur with reference only to my own
+idiosyncrasy. I was much surprised when I found first how individual it
+was, by a Pre-Raphaelite painter's declaring a piece of unwholesome
+reedy fen to be more beautiful than Benvenue.
+
+
+20. I cannot find words to express the intense pleasure I have always
+in first finding myself, after some prolonged stay in England, at the
+foot of the old tower of Calais Church. The large neglect, the noble
+unsightliness of it; the record of its years written so visibly, yet
+without sign of weakness or decay; its stern wasteness and gloom,
+eaten away by the Channel winds, and overgrown with the bitter sea
+grasses; its slates and tiles all shaken and rent, and yet not
+falling; its desert of brickwork, full of bolts, and holes, and ugly
+fissures, and yet strong, like a bare brown rock; its carelessness of
+what any one thinks or feels about it, putting forth no claim, having
+no beauty, nor desirableness, pride, nor grace; yet neither asking for
+pity; not, as ruins are, useless and piteous, feebly or fondly
+garrulous of better days; but, useful still, going through its own
+daily work,--as some old fisherman, beaten grey by storm, yet drawing
+his daily nets: so it stands, with no complaint about its past youth,
+in blanched and meagre massiveness and serviceableness, gathering
+human souls together underneath it; the sound of its bells for prayer
+still rolling through its rents; and the grey peak of it seen far
+across the sea, principal of the three that rise above the waste of
+surfy sand and hillocked shore,--the lighthouse for life, and the
+belfry for labour, and this--for patience and praise.
+
+I cannot tell the half of the strange pleasures and thoughts that come
+about me at the sight of that old tower; for, in some sort, it is the
+epitome of all that makes the continent of Europe interesting, as
+opposed to new countries; and, above all, it completely expresses that
+agedness in the midst of active life which binds the old and the new
+into harmony. We in England have our new streets, our new inn, our
+green shaven lawn, and our piece of ruin emergent from it--a mere
+_specimen_ of the Middle Ages put on a bit of velvet carpet, to be
+shown; and which, but for its size, might as well be on a museum shelf
+at once, under cover;--but, on the Continent, the links are unbroken
+between the past and present; and, in such use as they can serve for,
+the grey-headed wrecks are suffered to stay with men; while, in
+unbroken line, the generations of spared buildings are seen
+succeeding, each in its place. And thus, in its largeness, in its
+permitted evidence of slow decline, in its poverty, in its absence of
+all pretence, of all show and care for outside aspect, that Calais
+tower has an infinite of symbolism in it, all the more striking
+because usually seen in contrast with English scenes expressive of
+feelings the exact reverse of these.[13]
+
+[13] My friend won't write out the reverse! Our book is to be all jelly,
+and no powder, it seems. Well, I'm very thankful she likes the
+jelly,--at any rate, it makes me sure that _it_ is well made.
+
+
+
+
+SECTION III.
+
+ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY.
+
+
+21. It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the
+sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the
+sake of pleasing man--more for the sole and evident purpose of talking
+to him, and teaching him--than in any other of her works; and it is
+just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of
+her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than
+the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their
+organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as
+we know, be answered if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great,
+ugly, black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything
+well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps
+a film of morning and evening mist for dew;--and instead of this,
+there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when Nature is not
+producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory,
+and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the
+most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain[14] it is all done for
+us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever
+placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has
+this doing for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the earth can be
+seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live
+always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he
+ceases to feel them if he is always with them; but the sky is for all:
+bright as it is, it is not
+
+    "too bright nor good
+  For human nature's daily food;"
+
+it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and
+exalting of the heart,--for soothing it, and purifying it from its
+dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes
+awful--never the same for two moments together; almost human in its
+passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its
+infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its
+ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is
+essential. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject
+of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look
+upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon
+all which bears witness to the intentions of the Supreme that we are
+to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew
+which we share with the weed and the worm, as only a succession of
+meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be
+worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in
+our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a
+last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says, it has
+been wet; and another, it has been windy; and another, it has been
+warm. Who among the whole chattering crowd can tell one of the forms
+and the precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded
+the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came
+out of the south, and smote upon their summits until they melted and
+mouldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead
+clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew
+them before it like withered leaves? All has passed unregretted as
+unseen; or, if the apathy be ever shaken off even for an instant, it
+is only by what is gross, or what is extraordinary. And yet it is not
+in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not
+in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the
+highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the
+earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are
+but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be
+addressed through lamp-black and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued
+passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep and the calm, and the
+perpetual; that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it
+is understood; things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet
+vary eternally; which are never wanting, and never repeated; which are
+to be found always, yet each found but once;--it is through these that
+the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty
+given.
+
+[14] At least, I thought so, when I was four-and-twenty. At
+five-and-fifty, I fancy that it is just possible there may be other
+creatures in the universe to be pleased, or,--it may be,--displeased, by
+the weather.
+
+
+22. We habitually think of the rain-cloud only as dark and grey; not
+knowing that we owe to it perhaps the fairest, though not the most
+dazzling, of the hues of heaven. Often in our English mornings, the
+rain-clouds in the dawn form soft, level fields, which melt
+imperceptibly into the blue; or, when of less extent, gather into
+apparent bars, crossing the sheets of broader cloud above; and all
+these bathed throughout in an unspeakable light of pure rose-colour,
+and purple, and amber, and blue; not shining, but misty-soft; the
+barred masses, when seen nearer, composed of clusters or tresses of
+cloud, like floss silk; looking as if each knot were a little swathe
+or sheaf of lighted rain.
+
+
+23. Aqueous vapour or mist, suspended in the atmosphere, becomes
+visible exactly as dust does in the air of a room. In the shadows, you
+not only cannot see the dust itself, because unillumined, but you can
+see other objects through the dust, without obscurity; the air being
+thus actually rendered more transparent by a deprivation of light.
+Where a sunbeam enters, every particle of dust becomes visible, and a
+palpable interruption to the sight; so that a transverse sunbeam is a
+real obstacle to the vision--you cannot see things clearly through it.
+In the same way, wherever vapour is illuminated by transverse rays,
+there it becomes visible as a whiteness more or less affecting the
+purity of the blue, and destroying it exactly in proportion to the
+degree of illumination. But where vapour is in shade, it has very
+little effect on the sky, perhaps making it a little deeper and greyer
+than it otherwise would be, but not, itself, unless very dense,
+distinguishable or felt as mist.
+
+
+24. Has the reader any distinct idea of what clouds are?
+
+[15]That mist which lies in the morning so softly in the valley, level
+and white, through which the tops of the trees rise as if through an
+inundation--why is _it_ so heavy, and why does it lie so low, being
+yet so thin and frail that it will melt away utterly into splendour of
+morning when the sun has shone on it but a few moments more? Those
+colossal pyramids, huge and firm, with outlines as of rocks, and
+strength to bear the beating of the high sun full on their fiery
+flanks,--why are _they_ so light, their bases high over our heads,
+high over the heads of Alps? Why will these melt away, not as the sun
+_rises_, but as he _descends_, and leave the stars of twilight clear;
+while the valley vapour gains again upon the earth, like a shroud? Or
+that ghost of a cloud, which steals by yonder clump of pines; nay,
+which does _not_ steal by them, but haunts them, wreathing yet round
+them, and yet,--and yet,--slowly; now falling in a fair waved line
+like a woman's veil; now fading, now gone; we look away for an
+instant, and look back, and it is again there. What has it to do with
+that clump of pines, that it broods by them, and weaves itself among
+their branches, to and fro? Has it hidden a cloudy treasure among the
+moss at their roots, which it watches thus? Or has some strong
+enchanter charmed it into fond returning, or bound it fast within
+those bars of bough? And yonder filmy crescent, bent like an archer's
+bow above the snowy summit, the highest of all the hills--that white
+arch which never forms but over the supreme crest,--how is it stayed
+there, repelled apparently from the snow,--nowhere touching it, the
+clear sky seen between it and the mountain edge, yet never leaving
+it--poised as a white bird hovers over its nest? Or those war clouds
+that gather on the horizon, dragon-crested, tongued with fire,--how is
+their barbed strength bridled? What bits are those they are champing
+with their vapourous lips, flinging off flakes of black foam? Leagued
+leviathans of the Sea of Heaven,--out of their nostrils goeth smoke,
+and their eyes are like the eyelids of the morning; the sword of him
+that layeth at them cannot hold the spear, the dart, nor the
+habergeon. Where ride the captains of their armies? Where are set the
+measures of their march? Fierce murmurers, answering each other from
+morning until evening--what rebuke is this which has awed them into
+peace;--what hand has reined them back by the way in which they came?
+
+[15] This is a fifth volume bit, and worth more attention.
+
+I know not if the reader will think at first that questions like these
+are easily answered. So far from it, I rather believe that some of the
+mysteries of the clouds never will be understood by us at all.
+"Knowest thou the balancings of the clouds?" Is the answer ever to be
+one of pride? The wondrous works of Him, who is perfect in knowledge?
+Is _our_ knowledge ever to be so?...
+
+For my own part, I enjoy the mystery, and perhaps the reader may. I
+think he ought. He should not be less grateful for summer rain, or see
+less beauty in the clouds of morning, because they come to prove him
+with hard questions; to which perhaps, if we look close at the
+heavenly scroll, we may find also a syllable or two of answer,
+illuminated here and there.[16]
+
+[16] Compare, in 'Sartor Resartus,' the boy's watching from the garden
+wall.
+
+And though the climates of the south and east may be _comparatively_
+clear, they are no more absolutely clear than our own northern air.
+Intense clearness, whether, in the north, after or before rain, or in
+some moments of twilight in the south, is always, as far as I am
+acquainted with natural phenomena, a _notable_ thing. Mist of some
+sort, or mirage, or confusion of light or of cloud, are the general
+facts; the distance may vary in different climates at which the
+effects of mist begin, but they are always present; and therefore, in
+all probability, it is meant that we should enjoy them.... We surely
+need not wonder that mist and all its phenomena have been made
+delightful to us, since our happiness as thinking beings must depend
+on our being content to accept only partial knowledge even in those
+matters which chiefly concern us. If we insist upon perfect
+intelligibility and complete declaration in every moral subject, we
+shall instantly fall into misery of unbelief. Our whole happiness and
+power of energetic action depend upon our being able to breathe and
+live in the cloud; content to see it opening here, and closing there;
+rejoicing to catch through the thinnest films of it, glimpses of
+stable and substantial things; but yet perceiving a nobleness even in
+the concealment, and rejoicing that the kindly veil is spread where
+the untempered light might have scorched us, or the infinite clearness
+wearied. And I believe that the resentment of this interference of the
+mist is one of the forms of proud error which are too easily mistaken
+for virtues. To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed
+unmanly, and therefore we think that to love light and find knowledge
+must always be right. Yet (as in all matters before observed,)
+wherever _pride_ has any share in the work, even knowledge and light
+may be ill pursued. Knowledge is good, and light is good: yet man
+perished in seeking knowledge, and moths perish in seeking light; and
+if we, who are crushed before the moth, will not accept such mystery
+as is needful to us, we shall perish in like manner. But, accepted in
+humbleness, it instantly becomes an element of pleasure; and I think
+that every rightly constituted mind ought to rejoice, not so much in
+knowing anything clearly, as in feeling that there is infinitely more
+which it cannot know. None but proud or weak men would mourn over
+this, for we may always know more, if we choose, by working on; but
+the pleasure is, I think, to humble people, in knowing that the
+journey is endless, the treasure inexhaustible,--watching the cloud
+still march before them with its summitless pillar, and being sure
+that, to the end of time, and to the length of eternity, the mysteries
+of its infinity will still open farther and farther, their dimness
+being the sign and necessary adjunct of their inexhaustibleness. I
+know there are an evil mystery, and a deathful dimness,--the mystery
+of the great Babylon--the dimness of the sealed eye and soul; but do
+not let us confuse these with the glorious mystery of the things which
+the "angels desire to look into," or with the dimness which, even
+before the clear eye and open soul, still rests on sealed pages of the
+eternal volume.
+
+
+25. On some isolated mountain at day-break,[17] when the night mists
+first rise from off the plain, watch their white and lakelike fields,
+as they float in level bays, and winding gulfs, about the islanded
+summits of the lower hills, untouched yet by more than dawn, colder
+and more quiet than a windless sea under the moon of midnight; watch
+when the first sunbeam is sent upon the silver channels, how the foam
+of their undulating surface parts, and passes away, and down under
+their depths the glittering city and green pastures lie like Atlantis,
+between the white paths of winding rivers; the flakes of light falling
+every moment faster and broader among the starry spires, as the
+wreathed surges break and vanish above them, and the confused crests
+and ridges of the dark hills shorten their grey shadows upon the
+plain. Wait a little longer, and you shall see those scattered mists
+rallying in the ravines, and floating up towards you, along the
+winding valleys, till they crouch in quiet masses, iridescent with the
+morning light, upon the broad breasts of the higher hills, whose
+leagues of massy undulation will melt back, back into that robe of
+material light, until they fade away, lost in its lustre, to appear
+again above in the serene heaven like a wild, bright, impossible
+dream, foundationless, and inaccessible, their very bases vanishing in
+the unsubstantial and mocking blue of the deep lake below. Wait yet a
+little longer, and you shall see those mists gather themselves into
+white towers, and stand like fortresses along the promontories, massy
+and motionless, only piled, with every instant, higher and higher into
+the sky, and casting longer shadows athwart the rocks; and out of the
+pale blue of the horizon you will see forming and advancing a troop of
+narrow, dark, pointed vapours, which will cover the sky, inch by inch,
+with their grey network, and take the light off the landscape with an
+eclipse which will stop the singing of the birds, and the motion of
+the leaves, together;--and then you will see horizontal bars of black
+shadow forming under them, and lurid wreaths create themselves, you
+know not how, among the shoulders of the hills; you never see them
+form, but when you look back to a place which was clear an instant
+ago, there is a cloud on it, hanging by the precipice, as a hawk
+pauses over his prey;--and then you will hear the sudden rush of the
+awakened wind, and you will see those watch-towers of vapour swept
+away from their foundations, and waving curtains of opaque rain, let
+down to the valley, swinging from the burdened clouds in black bending
+fringes, or, pacing in pale columns along the lake level, grazing its
+surface into foam as they go. And then, as the sun sinks, you shall
+see the storm drift for an instant from off the hills, leaving their
+broad sides smoking and loaded yet with snow-white, torn, steam-like
+rags of capricious vapour, now gone, now gathered again,--while the
+smouldering sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a red-hot ball
+beside you, and as if you could reach it, plunges through the rushing
+wind and rolling cloud with headlong fall, as if it meant to rise no
+more, dyeing all the air about it with blood;--and then you shall hear
+the fainting tempest die in the hollow of the night, and you shall see
+a green halo kindling on the summit of the eastern hills, brighter,
+brighter yet, till the large white circle of the slow moon is lifted
+up among the barred clouds, step by step, line by line; star after
+star she quenches with her kindling light, setting in their stead an
+army of pale, penetrable, fleecy wreaths in the heaven, to give light
+upon the earth, which move together hand in hand, company by company,
+troop by troop, so measured in their unity of motion that the whole
+heaven seems to roll with them, and the earth to reel under them. And
+then wait yet for one hour, until the east again becomes purple, and
+the heaving mountains, rolling against it in darkness, like waves of a
+wild sea, are drowned one by one in the glory of its burning; watch
+the white glaciers blaze in their winding paths about the mountains,
+like mighty serpents with scales of fire; watch the columnar peaks of
+solitary snow, kindling downwards chasm by chasm, each in itself a new
+morning--their long avalanches cast down in keen streams brighter than
+the lightning, sending each his tribute of driven snow, like
+altar-smoke, up to heaven; the rose-light of their silent domes
+flushing that heaven about them, and above them, piercing with purer
+light through its purple lines of lifted cloud, casting a new glory on
+every wreath, as it passes by, until the whole heaven, one scarlet
+canopy, is interwoven with a roof of waving flame, and tossing vault
+beyond vault, as with the drifted wings of many companies of angels;
+and then, when you can look no more for gladness, and when you are
+bowed down with fear and love of the Maker and Doer of this, tell me
+who has best delivered this His message unto men!
+
+[17] I forget now what all this is about. It seems to be a recollection
+of the Rigi, with assumption that the enthusiastic spectator is to stand
+for a day and night in observation; to suffer the effects of a severe
+thunder-storm, and to get neither breakfast nor dinner. I have seen such
+a storm on the Rigi, however, and more than one such sunrise; and I much
+doubt if its present visitors by rail will see more.
+
+
+26.[18] The account given of the stages of creation in the first
+chapter of Genesis is in every respect clear and intelligible to the
+simplest reader, except in the statement of the work of the second
+day. I suppose that this statement is passed over by careless readers
+without any endeavour to understand it, and contemplated by simple and
+faithful readers as a sublime mystery which was not intended to be
+understood. But there is no mystery in any other part of the chapter,
+and it seems to me unjust to conclude that any was intended here. And
+the passage ought to be peculiarly interesting to us, as being the
+first in the Bible in which the heavens are named, and the only one in
+which the word "Heaven," all-important as that word is to our
+understanding of the most precious promises of Scripture, receives a
+definite explanation. Let us therefore see whether, by a little
+careful comparison of the verse with other passages in which the word
+occurs, we may not be able to arrive at as clear an understanding of
+this portion of the chapter as of the rest. In the first place the
+English word, "Firmament," itself is obscure and useless; because we
+never employ it but as a synonym of heaven, it conveys no other
+distinct idea to us; and the verse, though from our familiarity with
+it we imagine that it possesses meaning, has in reality no more point
+nor value than if it were written, "God said, Let there be a something
+in the midst of the waters, and God called the something, Heaven." But
+the marginal reading, "Expansion," has definite value; and the
+statement that "God said, Let there be an expansion in the midst of
+the waters, and God called the expansion, Heaven," has an
+apprehensible meaning. Accepting this expression as the one intended,
+we have next to ask what expansion there is, between two waters,
+describable by the term "heaven." Milton adopts the term "expanse,"
+but he understands it of the whole volume of the air which surrounds
+the earth. Whereas, so far as we can tell, there is no water beyond
+the air, in the fields of space; and the whole expression of division
+of waters from waters is thus rendered valueless. Now with respect to
+this whole chapter, we must remember always that it is intended for
+the instruction of all mankind, not for the learned reader only; and
+that therefore the most simple and natural interpretation is the
+likeliest in general to be the true one. An unscientific reader knows
+little about the manner in which the volume of the atmosphere
+surrounds the earth; but I imagine that he could hardly glance at the
+sky when rain was falling in the distance, and see the level line of
+the bases of the clouds from which the shower descended, without being
+able to attach an instant and easy meaning to the words, "expansion in
+the midst of the waters;" and if, having once seized this idea, he
+proceeded to examine it more accurately, he would perceive at once, if
+he had ever noticed _anything_ of the nature of clouds, that the level
+line of their bases did indeed most severely and stringently divide
+"waters from waters"--that is to say, divide water in its collective
+and tangible state, from water in its aerial state; or the waters
+which _fall_, and _flow_, from those which _rise_, and _float_. Next,
+if we try this interpretation in the theological sense of the word
+_heaven_, and examine whether the clouds are spoken of as God's
+dwelling-place, we find God going before the Israelites in a pillar of
+cloud; revealing Himself in a cloud on Sinai; appearing in a cloud on
+the mercy-seat; filling the Temple of Solomon with the cloud when its
+dedication is accepted; appearing in a great cloud to Ezekiel;
+ascending into a cloud before the eyes of the disciples on Mount
+Olivet; and in like manner returning to judgment: "Behold He cometh
+with clouds, and every eye shall see Him." "Then shall they see the
+Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great
+glory." While, further, the "clouds" and "heavens" are used as
+interchangeable words in those psalms which most distinctly set forth
+the power of God: "He bowed the heavens also, and came down; He made
+darkness pavilions round about Him, dark waters, and thick clouds of
+the skies." And again, "Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens, and Thy
+faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds." And again, "His excellency is
+over Israel, and His strength is in the clouds." And again, "The
+clouds poured out water, the skies sent out a sound, the voice of Thy
+thunder was in the heaven." Again, "Clouds and darkness are round
+about Him, righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His
+throne; the heavens declare His righteousness, and all the people see
+His glory." In all these passages the meaning is unmistakable if they
+possess definite meaning at all. We are too apt to take them merely
+for sublime and vague imagery, and therefore gradually to lose the
+apprehension of their life and power. The expression, "He bowed the
+heavens," for instance, is, I suppose, received by most readers as a
+magnificent hyperbole, having reference to some peculiar and fearful
+manifestation of God's power to the writer of the psalm in which the
+words occur. But the expression either has _plain_ meaning, or it has
+_no_ meaning. Understand by the term "heavens" the compass of infinite
+space around the earth, and the expression "bowed the heavens,"
+however sublime, is wholly without meaning: infinite space cannot be
+bent or bowed. But understand by the "heavens" the veil of clouds
+above the earth, and the expression is neither hyperbolical nor
+obscure; it is pure, plain, accurate truth, and it describes God, not
+as revealing Himself in any peculiar way to David, but doing what He
+is still doing before our own eyes, day by day. By accepting the words
+in their simple sense, we are thus led to apprehend the immediate
+presence of the Deity, and His purpose of manifesting Himself as near
+us whenever the storm-cloud stoops upon its course; while by our vague
+and inaccurate acceptance of the words, we remove the idea of His
+presence far from us, into a region which we can neither see nor know:
+and gradually, from the close realization of a living God, who "maketh
+the clouds His chariot," we define and explain ourselves into dim and
+distant suspicion of an inactive God inhabiting inconceivable places,
+and fading into the multitudinous formalisms of the laws of Nature.
+All errors of this kind--and in the present day we are in constant and
+grievous danger of falling into them--arise from the originally
+mistaken idea that man can, "by searching, find out God--find out the
+Almighty to perfection"--that is to say, by help of courses of
+reasoning and accumulations of science, apprehend the nature of the
+Deity, in a more exalted and more accurate manner than in a state of
+comparative ignorance; whereas it is clearly necessary, from the
+beginning to the end of time, that God's way of revealing Himself to
+His creatures should be a _simple_ way, which _all_ those creatures
+may understand. Whether taught or untaught, whether of mean capacity
+or enlarged, it is necessary that communion with their Creator should
+be possible to all; and the admission to such communion must be
+rested, not on their having a knowledge of astronomy, but on their
+having a human soul. In order to render this communion possible, the
+Deity has stooped from His throne, and has, not only in the person of
+the Son, taken upon Him the veil of our human _flesh_, but, in the
+person of the Father, taken upon Him the veil of our human _thoughts_,
+and permitted us, by His own spoken authority, to conceive Him simply
+and clearly as a loving father and friend; a being to be walked with
+and reasoned with, to be moved by our entreaties, angered by our
+rebellion, alienated by our coldness, pleased by our love, and
+glorified by our labour; and, finally, to be beheld in immediate and
+active presence in all the powers and changes of creation. This
+conception of God, which is the child's, is evidently the only one
+which can be universal, and, therefore, the only one which _for us_
+can be true. The moment that, in our pride of heart, we refuse to
+accept the condescension of the Almighty, and desire Him, instead of
+stooping to hold our hands, to rise up before us into His glory, we
+hoping that, by standing on a grain of dust or two of human knowledge
+higher than our fellows, we may behold the Creator as He rises,--God
+takes us at our word. He rises into His own invisible and
+inconceivable majesty; He goes forth upon the ways which are not our
+ways, and retires into the thoughts which are not our thoughts; and we
+are left alone. And presently we say in our vain hearts, "There is no
+God."
+
+[18] This passage, to the end of the section, is one of the last, and
+best, which I wrote in the temper of my youth; and I can still ratify
+it, thus far, that the texts referred to in it must either be received
+as it explains them, or neglected altogether.
+
+I would desire, therefore, to receive God's account of His own
+creation as under the ordinary limits of human knowledge and
+imagination it would be received by a simple-minded man; and finding
+that "the heavens and the earth" are spoken of always as having
+something like equal relation to each other, ("Thus the heavens and
+the earth were finished, and all the host of them,") I reject at once
+all idea of the term "heavens" being intended to signify the infinity
+of space inhabited by countless worlds; for between those infinite
+heavens and the particle of sand, which not the earth only, but the
+sun itself, with all the solar system, is, in relation to them, no
+relation of equality or comparison could be inferred. But I suppose
+the heavens to mean that part of creation which holds equal
+companionship with our globe; I understand the "rolling of these
+heavens together as a scroll," to be an equal and relative destruction
+with the melting of the elements in fervent heat; and I understand the
+making of the firmament to signify that, so far as man is concerned,
+most magnificent ordinance of the clouds;--the ordinance that, as the
+great plain of waters was formed on the face of the earth, so also a
+plain of waters should be stretched along the height of air, and the
+face of the cloud answer the face of the ocean; and that this upper
+and heavenly plain should be of waters, as it were, glorified in their
+nature, no longer quenching the fire, but now bearing fire in their
+own bosoms; no longer murmuring only when the winds raise them or
+rocks divide, but answering each other with their own voices, from
+pole to pole; no longer restrained by established shores, and guided
+through unchanging channels, but going forth at their pleasure like
+the armies of the angels, and choosing their encampments upon the
+heights of the hills; no longer hurried downwards for ever, moving but
+to fall, nor lost in the lightless accumulation of the abyss, but
+covering the east and west with the waving of their wings, and robing
+the gloom of the farther infinite with a vesture of diverse colours,
+of which the threads are purple and scarlet, and the embroideries
+flame.
+
+This I believe is the ordinance of the firmament; and it seems to me
+that in the midst of the material nearness of these heavens, God means
+us to acknowledge His own immediate presence as visiting, judging, and
+blessing us: "The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the
+presence of God." "He doth set His bow in the clouds," and thus
+renews, in the sound of every drooping swathe of rain, His promises of
+everlasting love. "In them hath He set a _tabernacle_ for the sun;"
+whose burning ball, which, without the firmament, would be seen but as
+an intolerable and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by
+that firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by
+mediatorial ministries: by the firmament of clouds the temple is
+built, for his presence to fill with light at noon; by the firmament
+of clouds the purple veil is closed at evening, round the sanctuary of
+his rest; by the mists of the firmament his implacable light is
+divided, and its separated fierceness appeased into the soft blue that
+fills the depth of distance with its bloom, and the flush with which
+the mountains burn, as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring.
+And in this tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the
+shadows of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of
+His own Majesty to men, upon the throne of the firmament. As the
+Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity, we cannot
+behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the Preserver of men,
+those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place: "Swear not, neither by
+heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is His
+footstool!" And all those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and
+grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built about
+the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening thunders, and
+glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in our
+hearts the acceptance, and distinctness, and dearness of the simple
+words, "Our Father, which art in heaven."
+
+
+
+
+SECTION IV.
+
+ILLUSTRATIVE: STREAMS AND SEA.
+
+
+27. Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper nature,
+and without assistance and combination, water is the most wonderful.
+If we think of it as the source of all the changefulness and beauty
+which we have seen in clouds,--then, as the instrument by which the
+earth we have contemplated was modelled into symmetry, and its crags
+chiselled into grace;--then, as in the form of snow, it robes the
+mountains it has made with that transcendent light which we could not
+have conceived if we had not seen;--then, as it exists in the foam of
+the torrent, in the iris which spans it, in the morning mist which
+rises from it, in the deep crystalline pools which mirror its hanging
+shore, in the broad lake and glancing river;--finally, in that which
+is to all human minds the best emblem of unwearied, unconquerable
+power the wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of the sea;--what
+shall we compare to this mighty, this universal element, for glory and
+beauty? or how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of feeling?
+It is like trying to paint a soul!
+
+
+28. The great angel of the sea--rain; the angel, observe,--the
+messenger sent to a special place on a special errand. Not the
+diffused, perpetual presence of the burden of mist, but the going and
+returning of the intermittent cloud. All turns upon that
+intermittence. Soft moss on stone and rock; cave fern of tangled glen;
+wayside well--perennial, patient, silent, clear, stealing through its
+square font of rough-hewn stone; ever thus deep, no more;--which the
+winter wreck sullies not, the summer thirst wastes not, incapable of
+stain as of decline;--where the fallen leaf floats undecayed, and the
+insect darts undefiling: cressed brook and ever-eddying river, lifted
+even in flood scarcely over its stepping stones,--but through all
+sweet summer keeping tremulous music with harp-strings of dark water
+among the silver fingering of the pebbles. Far away in the south the
+strong river gods have all hasted, and gone down to the sea. Wasted
+and burning, white furnaces of blasting sand, their broad beds lie
+ghastly and bare; but here in the moss lands, the soft wings of the
+sea angel droop still with dew, and the shadows of their plumes falter
+on the hills; strange laughings and glitterings of silver streamlets,
+born suddenly, and twined about the mossy heights in trickling tinsel,
+answering to them as they wave.
+
+
+29. Stand for half an hour beside the fall of Schaffhausen, on the
+north side, where the rapids are long, and watch how the vault of
+water first bends unbroken, in pure polished velocity, over the
+arching rocks at the brow of the cataract, covering them with a dome
+of crystal twenty feet thick, so swift that its motion is unseen
+except when a foam globe from above darts over it like a falling star;
+and how the trees are lighted above it under all their leaves,[19] at
+the instant that it breaks into foam; and how all the hollows of that
+foam burn with green fire like so much shattering chrysoprase; and
+how, ever and anon startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray
+leaps hissing out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in the wind and
+driven away in dust, filling the air with light; and how through the
+curdling wreaths of the restless crashing abyss below, the blue of the
+water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky through
+white rain-cloud, while the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous
+stillness over all, fading and flushing alternately through the
+choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among the
+thick golden leaves which toss to and fro in sympathy with the wild
+water,--their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of
+loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again
+upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away,--the dew gushing from
+their thick branches through drooping clusters of emerald herbage, and
+sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks of the shore, feeding
+the lichens, which chase and chequer them with purple and silver.
+
+[19] Well noticed. The drawing of the fall of Schaffhausen, which I made
+at the time of writing this study, was one of the very few, either by
+other draughtsmen or myself, which I have seen Turner pause at with
+serious attention.
+
+
+30. Close beside the path by which travellers ascend the Montanvert
+from the valley of Chamouni, on the right hand, where it first begins
+to rise among the pines, there descends a small stream from the foot
+of the granite peak known to the guides as the Aiguille Charmoz. It is
+concealed from the traveller by a thicket of alder, and its murmur is
+hardly heard, for it is one of the weakest streams of the valley. But
+it is a constant stream, fed by a permanent, though small, glacier;
+and continuing to flow even to the close of summer, when more copious
+torrents, depending only on the melting of the lower snows, have left
+their beds,--"stony channels in the sun." The long drought which took
+place in the autumn of 1854, sealing every source of waters except
+these perpetual ones, left the torrent of which I am speaking, and
+such others, in a state peculiarly favourable to observance of their
+_least_ action on the mountains from which they descend. They were
+entirely limited to their own ice fountains, and the quantity of
+powdered rock which they brought down was, of course, at its minimum,
+being nearly unmingled with any earth derived from the dissolution of
+softer soil, or vegetable mould, by rains. At three in the afternoon,
+on a warm day in September, when the torrent had reached its average
+maximum strength for the day, I filled an ordinary Bordeaux wine flask
+with the water where it was least turbid. From this quart of water I
+obtained twenty-four grains of sand and sediment more or less fine. I
+cannot estimate the quantity of water in the stream; but the runlet of
+it at which I filled the flask was giving about two hundred bottles a
+minute, or rather more, carrying down, therefore, about three quarters
+of a pound of powdered granite every minute. This would be forty-five
+pounds an hour; but allowing for the inferior power of the stream in
+the cooler periods of the day, and taking into consideration, on the
+other side, its increased power in rain, we may, I think, estimate its
+average hour's work at twenty-eight or thirty pounds, or a
+hundredweight every four hours. By this insignificant runlet,
+therefore, rather more than two tons of the substance of the Mont
+Blanc are displaced and carried down a certain distance every week;
+and as it is only for three or four months that the flow of the stream
+is checked by frost, we may certainly allow eighty tons for the mass
+which it annually moves. It is not worth while to enter into any
+calculation of the relation borne by this runlet to the great torrents
+which descend from the chain of Mont Blanc into the valley of
+Chamouni.[20] I but take this quantity, eighty tons, as the result of
+the labour of a scarcely noticeable runlet at the side of one of them,
+utterly irrespective of all sudden falls of stones and of masses of
+mountain (a single thunderbolt will sometimes leave a scar on the
+flank of a soft rock looking like a trench for a railroad), and we
+shall then begin to apprehend something of the operation of the great
+laws of change which are the conditions of all material existence,
+however apparently enduring. The hills, which, as compared with living
+beings, seem "everlasting," are in truth as perishing as they; its
+veins of flowing fountain weary the mountain heart, as the crimson
+pulse does ours; the natural force of the iron crag is abated in its
+appointed time, like the strength of the sinews in a human old age;
+and it is but the lapse of the longer years of decay which, in the
+sight of its Creator, distinguishes the mountain range from the moth
+and the worm.
+
+[20] I have slightly modified and abridged what follows, being impatient
+of its prolixity, as well as ashamed of what is truly called the
+ludicrous under-estimate of the mass of the larger streams.
+
+
+31. Few people, comparatively, have ever seen the effect on the sea of
+a powerful gale continued without intermission for three or four days
+and nights; and to those who have not, I believe it must be
+unimaginable, not from the mere force or size of surge, but from the
+complete annihilation of the limit between sea and air. The water,
+from its prolonged agitation, is beaten, not into mere creamy foam,
+but into masses of accumulated yeast, which hang in ropes and wreaths
+from wave to wave; and where one curls over to break, form a festoon
+like a drapery from its edge; these are taken up by the wind, not in
+dissipating dust, but bodily, in writhing, hanging, coiling masses,
+which make the air white, and thick as with snow, only the flakes are
+a foot or two long each; the surges themselves are full of foam in
+their very bodies, underneath, making them white all through, as the
+water is under a great cataract,--and their masses, being thus half
+water and half air, are torn to pieces by the wind whenever they rise,
+and carried away in roaring smoke, which chokes and strangles like
+actual water. Add to this, that when the air has been exhausted of its
+moisture by long rain, the spray of the sea is caught by it as
+described above, and covers its surface not merely with the smoke of
+finely divided water, but with boiling mist: imagine also the low
+rain-clouds brought down to the very level of the sea, as I have often
+seen them, whirling and flying in rags and fragments from wave to
+wave; and finally conceive the surges themselves in their utmost pitch
+of power, velocity, vastness, and madness, lifting themselves in
+precipices and peaks furrowed with their whirl of ascent, through all
+this chaos; and you will understand that there is indeed no
+distinction left between the sea and air; that no object, nor horizon,
+nor any landmark, or natural evidence of position is left; that the
+heaven is all spray, and the ocean all cloud, and that you can see no
+farther in any direction than you could see through a cataract.[21]
+
+[21] The whole of this was written merely to show the meaning of
+Turner's picture of the steamer in distress, throwing up signals. It is
+a good study of wild weather; but, separate from its aim, utterly feeble
+in comparison to the few words by which any of the great poets will
+describe sea, when they have got to do it. I am rather proud of the
+short sentence in the 'Harbours of England,' describing a great breaker
+against rock:--"One moment, a flint cave,--the next, a marble
+pillar,--the next, a fading cloud." But there is nothing in
+sea-description, detailed, like Dickens' storm at the death of Ham, in
+'David Copperfield.'
+
+
+
+
+SECTION V.
+
+ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS.
+
+
+32. The words which marked for us the purpose of the clouds are
+followed immediately by those notable ones,--"And God said, Let the
+waters which are under the heavens be gathered together into one
+place, and let the dry land appear." We do not, perhaps, often enough
+consider the deep signification of this sentence. We are too apt to
+receive it as the description of an event vaster only in its extent,
+not in its nature, than the compelling of the Red Sea to draw back
+that Israel might pass by. We imagine the Deity in like manner rolling
+the waves of the greater ocean together on an heap, and setting bars
+and doors to them eternally. But there is a far deeper meaning than
+this in the solemn words of Genesis, and in the correspondent verse of
+the Psalm, "His hands prepared the dry land." Up to that moment the
+earth had been _void_; for, it had been _without_ _form_. The command
+that the waters should be gathered, was the command that the earth
+should be _sculptured_. The sea was not driven to its place in
+suddenly restrained rebellion, but withdrawn to its place in perfect
+and patient obedience. The dry land appeared, not in level sands
+forsaken by the surges, which those surges might again claim for their
+own; but in range beyond range of swelling hill and iron rock, for
+ever to claim kindred with the firmament, and be companioned by the
+clouds of heaven.
+
+What space of time was in reality occupied by the "day" of Genesis, is
+not at present of any importance for us to consider. By what furnaces
+of fire the adamant was melted, and by what wheels of earthquake it
+was torn, and by what teeth of glacier and weight of sea-waves it was
+engraven and finished into its perfect form, we may, perhaps,
+hereafter endeavour to conjecture; but here, as in few words the work
+is summed by the historian, so in few broad thoughts it should be
+comprehended by us; and, as we read the mighty sentence, "Let the dry
+land appear," we should try to follow the finger of God as it engraved
+upon the stone tables of the earth the letters and the law of its
+everlasting form, as gulf by gulf the channels of the deep were
+ploughed; and cape by cape the lines were traced with Divine
+foreknowledge of the shores that were to limit the nations; and chain
+by chain the mountain walls were lengthened forth, and their
+foundations fastened for ever; and the compass was set upon the face
+of the depth, and the fields and the highest part of the dust of the
+world were made; and the right hand of Christ first strewed the snow
+on Lebanon, and smoothed the slopes of Calvary.
+
+It is not, I repeat, always needful, in many respects it is not
+possible, to conjecture the manner or the time in which this work was
+done; but it is deeply necessary for all men to consider the
+magnificence of the accomplished purpose, and the depth of the wisdom
+and love which are manifested in the ordinances of the hills. For
+observe, in order to bring the world into the form which it now bears,
+it was not mere _sculpture_ that was needed; the mountains could not
+stand for a day unless they were formed of materials altogether
+different from those which constitute the lower hills, and the
+surfaces of the valleys. A harder substance had to be prepared for
+every mountain chain, yet not so hard but that it might be capable of
+crumbling down into earth fit to nourish the Alpine forest, and the
+Alpine flower; not so hard but that in the midst of the utmost majesty
+of its enthroned strength there should be seen on it the seal of
+death, and the writing of the same sentence that had gone forth
+against the human frame, "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
+return." And with this perishable substance the most majestic forms
+were to be framed that were consistent with the safety of man; and the
+peak was to be lifted and the cliff rent, as high and as steeply as
+was possible, in order yet to permit the shepherd to feed his flocks
+upon the slopes, and the cottage to nestle beneath their shadow. And
+observe, two distinct ends were to be accomplished in doing this. It
+was, indeed, absolutely necessary that such eminences should be
+created, in order to fit the earth in any wise for human habitation;
+for without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing
+of the rivers sustained, and the earth must have become for the most
+part plain, or stagnant marsh. But the feeding of the rivers and the
+purifying of the winds, are the least of the services appointed to the
+hills. To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God's
+working--to startle its lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of
+astonishment,--are their higher missions. They are as a great and
+noble architecture, first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and
+covered also with mighty sculpture and painted legend. It is
+impossible to examine, in their connected system, the features of even
+the most ordinary mountain scenery, without concluding that it has
+been prepared in order to unite as far as possible, and in the closest
+compass, every means of delighting and sanctifying the heart of man:
+"as far as _possible_,"--that is, as far as is consistent with the
+fulfilment of the sentence of condemnation on the whole earth. Death
+must be upon the hills; and the cruelty of the tempests smite them,
+and the briar and thorn spring up upon them; but they so smite as to
+bring their rocks into the fairest forms, and so spring as to make the
+very desert blossom as the rose. Even among our own hills of Scotland
+and Cumberland, though often too barren to be perfectly beautiful, and
+always too low to be perfectly sublime, it is strange how many deep
+sources of delight are gathered into the compass of their glens and
+vales; and how, down to the most secret cluster of their far-away
+flowers, and the idlest leap of their straying streamlets, the whole
+heart of Nature seems thirsting to give, and still to give, shedding
+forth her everlasting beneficence with a profusion so patient, so
+passionate, that our utmost observance and thankfulness are but, at
+last, neglects of her nobleness, and apathy to her love. But among the
+true mountains of the greater orders, the Divine purpose of appeal at
+once to all the faculties of the human spirit becomes still more
+manifest. Inferior hills ordinarily interrupt, in some degree, the
+richness of the valleys at their feet; the grey downs of southern
+England and treeless coteaux of central France, and grey swells of
+Scottish moor, whatever peculiar charm they may possess in themselves,
+are at least destitute of those which belong to the woods and fields
+of the lowlands. But the great mountains _lift_ the lowlands on _their
+sides_. Let the reader imagine first the appearance of the most varied
+plain of some richly cultivated country; let him imagine it dark with
+graceful woods, and soft with deepest pastures; let him fill the space
+of it, to the utmost horizon, with innumerable and changeful incidents
+of scenery and life; leading pleasant streamlets through its meadows,
+strewing clusters of cottages beside their banks, tracing sweet
+footpaths through its avenues, and animating its fields with happy
+flocks, and slow wandering spots of cattle; and when he has wearied
+himself with endless imagining, and left no space without some
+loveliness of its own, let him conceive all this great plain, with its
+infinite treasures of natural beauty, and happy human life, gathered
+up in God's hands from one edge of the horizon to the other, like a
+woven garment, and shaken into deep falling folds, as the robes droop
+from a king's shoulders; all its bright rivers leaping into cataracts
+along the hollows of its fall, and all its forests rearing themselves
+aslant against its slopes, as a rider rears himself back when his
+horse plunges, and all its villages nestling themselves into the new
+windings of its glens, and all its pastures thrown into steep waves of
+greensward, dashed with dew along the edges of their folds, and
+sweeping down into endless slopes, with a cloud here and there lying
+quietly, half on the grass, half in the air,--and he will have as yet,
+in all this lifted world, only the foundation of one of the great
+Alps. And whatever is lovely in the lowland scenery, becomes lovelier
+in this change; the trees which grew heavily and stiffly from the
+level line of plain, assume strange curves of strength and grace as
+they bend themselves against the mountain side; they breathe more
+freely and toss their branches more carelessly as each climbs higher,
+looking to the clear light above the topmost leaves of its brother
+tree; the flowers which on the arable plain fall before the plough,
+now find out for themselves unapproachable places where year by year
+they gather into happier fellowship, and fear no evil; and the streams
+which in the level land crept in dark eddies by unwholesome banks, now
+move in showers of silver, and are clothed with rainbows, and bring
+health and life wherever the glance of their waves can reach....
+
+It may not, therefore, be altogether profitless or unnecessary to
+review briefly the nature of the three great offices which mountain
+ranges are appointed to fulfil, in order to preserve the health and
+increase the happiness of mankind. Their first use is, of course, to
+give motion to water. Every fountain and river, from the inch-deep
+streamlet that crosses the village lane in trembling clearness, to the
+massy and silent march of the everlasting multitude of waters in
+Amazon or Ganges, owe their play, and purity, and power, to the
+ordained elevations of the earth. Gentle or steep, extended or abrupt,
+some determined slope of the earth's surface is of course necessary
+before any wave can so much as overtake one sedge in its pilgrimage;
+and how seldom do we enough consider, as we walk beside the margins of
+our pleasant brooks, how beautiful and wonderful is that ordinance, of
+which every blade of grass that waves in their clear water is a
+perpetual sign--that the dew and rain fallen on the face of the earth
+shall find no resting-place; shall find, on the contrary, fixed
+channels traced for them from the ravines of the central crests down
+which they roar, in sudden ranks of foam, to the dark hollows beneath
+the banks of lowland pasture, round which they must circle slowly
+among the stems and beneath the leaves of the lilies; paths prepared
+for them by which, at some appointed rate of journey, they must
+evermore descend, sometimes slow, and sometimes swift, but never
+pausing; the daily portion of the earth they have to glide over marked
+for them at each successive sunrise, the place which has known them
+knowing them no more, and the gateways of guarding mountains opened
+for them in cleft and chasm, none letting them in their pilgrimage;
+and, from afar off, the great heart of the sea calling them to itself!
+"Deep calleth unto deep." I know not which of the two is the more
+wonderful,--that calm, gradated, invisible slope of the champaign
+land, which gives motion to the stream; or that passage cloven for it
+through the ranks of hill, which, necessary for the health of the land
+immediately around them, would yet, unless so supernaturally divided,
+have fatally intercepted the flow of the waters from far-off
+countries. When did the great spirit of the river first knock at these
+adamantine gates? When did the porter open to it, and cast his keys
+away for ever, lapped in whirling sand? I am not satisfied--no one
+should be satisfied--with that vague answer, The river cut its way.
+Not so. The river _found_ its way. [22]I do not see that rivers in
+their own strength can do much in cutting their way; they are nearly
+as apt to choke their channels up as to carve them out. Only give a
+river some little sudden power in a valley, and see how it will use
+it. Cut itself a bed? Not so, by any means, but fill up its bed; and
+look for another in a wild, dissatisfied, inconsistent manner,--any
+way rather than the old one will better please it; and even if it is
+banked up and forced to keep to the old one, it will not deepen, but
+do all it can to raise it, and leap out of it. And although wherever
+water has a steep fall it will swiftly cut itself a bed deep into the
+rock or ground, it will not, when the rock is hard, cut a wider
+channel than it actually needs; so that if the existing river beds,
+through ranges of mountains, had in reality been cut by the streams,
+they would be found, wherever the rocks are hard, only in the form of
+narrow and profound ravines, like the well-known channel of the
+Niagara, below the fall; not in that of extended valleys. And the
+actual work of true mountain rivers, though often much greater in
+proportion to their body of water than that of the Niagara, is quite
+insignificant when compared with the area and depth of the valleys
+through which they flow; so that, although in many cases it appears
+that those larger valleys have been excavated at earlier periods by
+more powerful streams, or by the existing stream in a more powerful
+condition, still the great fact remains always equally plain, and
+equally admirable, that, whatever the nature and duration of the
+agencies employed, the earth was so shaped at first as to direct the
+currents of its rivers in the manner most healthy and convenient for
+man. The valley of the Rhone may have been in great part excavated, in
+early times, by torrents a thousand times larger than the Rhone; but
+it could not have been excavated at all, unless the mountains had been
+thrown at first into two chains, by which the torrents were set to
+work in a given direction. And it is easy to conceive how, under any
+less beneficent dispositions of their masses of hill, the continents
+of the earth might either have been covered with enormous lakes, as
+parts of North America actually are covered; or have become
+wildernesses of pestiferous marsh; or lifeless plains, upon which the
+water would have dried as it fell, leaving them for great part of the
+year desert. Such districts do exist, and exist in vastness; the whole
+earth is not prepared for the habitation of man; only certain small
+portions are prepared for him,--the houses, as it were, of the human
+race, from which they are to look abroad upon the rest of the world;
+not to wonder or complain that it is not all house, but to be grateful
+for the kindness of the admirable building, in the house itself, as
+compared with the rest. It would be as absurd to think it an evil that
+all the world is not fit for us to inhabit, as to think it an evil
+that the globe is no larger than it is. As much as we shall ever need
+is evidently assigned to us for our dwelling-place; the rest, covered
+with rolling waves or drifting sands, fretted with ice or crested with
+fire, is set before us for contemplation in an uninhabitable
+magnificence. And that part which we are enabled to inhabit owes its
+fitness for human life chiefly to its mountain ranges, which, throwing
+the superfluous rain off as it falls, collect it in streams or lakes,
+and guide it into given places, and in given directions; so that men
+can build their cities in the midst of fields which they know will be
+always fertile, and establish the lines of their commerce upon streams
+which will not fail.
+
+[22] I attach great importance to the remaining contents of this
+passage, and have had occasion to insist on them at great length in
+recent lectures at Oxford.
+
+Nor is this giving of motion to water to be considered as confined
+only to the surface of the earth. A no less important function of the
+hills is in directing the flow of the fountains and springs from
+subterranean reservoirs. There is no miraculous springing up of water
+out of the ground at our feet; but every fountain and well is supplied
+from reservoirs among the hills, so placed as to involve some slight
+fall or pressure enough to secure the constant flowing of the stream;
+and the incalculable blessing of the power given to us, in most
+valleys, of reaching by excavation some point whence the water will
+rise to the surface of the ground in perennial flow, is entirely owing
+to the concave dispositions of the beds of clay or rock raised from
+beneath the bosom of the valley into ranks of enclosing hills.
+
+The second great use of mountains is to maintain a constant change in
+the currents and nature of the _air_. Such change would, of course,
+have been partly caused by difference in soil and vegetation, even if
+the earth had been level; but to a far less extent than it is now by
+the chains of hills which--exposing on one side their masses of rock
+to the full heat of the sun, (increased by the angle at which the rays
+strike on the slope,) and on the other casting a soft shadow for
+leagues over the plains at their feet--divide the earth not only into
+districts, but into climates; and cause perpetual currents of air to
+traverse their passes in a thousand different states; moistening it
+with the spray of their waterfalls, sucking it down and beating it
+hither and thither in the pools of their torrents, closing it within
+clefts and caves, where the sunbeams never reach, till it is as cold
+as November mists; then sending it forth again to breathe lightly
+across the slopes of velvet fields, or to be scorched among sunburnt
+shales and grassless crags; then drawing it back in moaning swirls
+through clefts of ice, and up into dewy wreaths above the snow-fields;
+then piercing it with strange electric darts and flashes of mountain
+fire, and tossing it high in fantastic storm-cloud, as the dried grass
+is tossed by the mower, only suffering it to depart at last, when
+chastened and pure, to refresh the faded air of the far-off plains.
+
+The third great use of mountains is to cause perpetual change in the
+_soils_ of the earth. Without such provision the ground under
+cultivation would in a series of years become exhausted, and require
+to be upturned laboriously by the hand of man. But the elevations of
+the earth's surface provide for it a perpetual renovation. The higher
+mountains suffer their summits to be broken into fragments, and to be
+cast down in sheets of massy rock, full, as we shall see presently, of
+every substance necessary for the nourishment of plants; these fallen
+fragments are again broken by frost, and ground by torrents, into
+various conditions of sand and clay--materials which are distributed
+perpetually by the streams farther and farther from the mountain's
+base. Every shower that swells the rivulet enables their waters to
+carry certain portions of earth into new positions, and exposes new
+banks of ground to be mined in their turn. That turbid foaming of the
+angry water,--that tearing down of bank and rock along the flanks of
+its fury,--are no disturbances of the kind course of nature; they are
+beneficent operations of laws necessary to the existence of man, and
+to the beauty of the earth. The process is continued more gently, but
+not less effectively, over all the surface of the lower undulating
+country; and each filtering thread of summer rain which trickles
+through the short turf of the uplands is bearing its own appointed
+burden of earth to be thrown down on some new natural garden in the
+dingles beneath.
+
+I have not spoken of the local and peculiar utilities of mountains. I
+do not count the benefit of the supply of summer streams from the
+moors of the higher ranges,--of the various medicinal plants which are
+nested among their rocks,--of the delicate pasturage which they
+furnish for cattle,--of the forests in which they bear timber for
+shipping,--the stones they supply for building, or the ores of metal
+which they collect into spots open to discovery, and easy for working.
+All these benefits are of a secondary or a limited nature. But the
+three great functions which I have just described, those of giving
+motion and change to water, air, and earth, are indispensable to human
+existence; they are operations to be regarded with as full a depth of
+gratitude as the laws which bid the tree bear fruit, or the seed
+multiply itself in the earth. And thus those desolate and threatening
+ranges of dark mountain, which in nearly all ages of the world men
+have looked upon with aversion, or with terror, and shrunk back from
+as if they were haunted by perpetual images of death, are in reality
+sources of life and happiness far fuller and more beneficent than all
+the bright fruitfulness of the plain. The valleys only feed; the
+mountains feed, and guard, and strengthen us. We take our idea of
+fearlessness and sublimity alternately from the mountains and the sea;
+but we associate them unjustly. The sea-wave, with all its
+beneficence, is yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave of the
+blue mountain is lifted towards heaven in a stillness of perpetual
+mercy; and the one surge, unfathomable in its darkness, the other
+unshaken in its faithfulness, for ever bear the seal of their
+appointed symbolism:--
+
+"Thy _righteousness_ is like the great mountains;
+
+"Thy _judgments_ are a great deep."
+
+
+33. Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent
+muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its
+anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive
+energy, full of expression, passion, and strength; the plains and the
+lower hills are the repose and the effortless motion of the frame,
+when its muscles lie dormant and concealed beneath the lines of its
+beauty,--yet ruling those lines in their every undulation. This then
+is the first grand principle of the truth of the earth. The spirit of
+the hills is action, that of the lowlands repose; and between these
+there is to be found every variety of motion and rest, from the
+inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to
+the fiery peaks, which, with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with
+the clouds drifting like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up
+their Titan heads to Heaven, saying, "I live for ever."
+
+
+34. Where they are,[23] they seem to form the world; no mere bank of a
+river here, or of a lane there, peeping out among the hedges or
+forests, but from the lowest valley to the highest clouds, all is
+theirs,--one adamantine dominion and rigid authority of rock. We yield
+ourselves to the impression of their eternal unconquerable
+stubbornness of strength; their mass seems the least yielding, least
+to be softened, or in anywise dealt with by external force, of all
+earthly substance. And behold, as we look further into it, it is all
+touched and troubled, like waves by a summer breeze; rippled far more
+delicately than seas or lakes are rippled; _they_ only undulate along
+their surfaces--this rock trembles through its every fibre, like the
+chords of an Eolian harp, like the stillest air of spring, with the
+echoes of a child's voice. Into the heart of all those great
+mountains, through every tossing of their boundless crests, and deep
+beneath all their unfathomable defiles, flows that strange quivering
+of their substance. Other and weaker things seem to express their
+subjection to an Infinite Power only by momentary terrors: as the
+weeds bow down before the feverish wind, and the sound of the going in
+the tops of the taller trees passes on before the clouds, and the
+fitful opening of pale spaces on the dark water, as if some invisible
+hand were casting dust abroad upon it, gives warning of the anger that
+is to come, we may well imagine that there is a fear passing upon the
+grass, and leaves, and waters, at the presence of some great spirit
+commissioned to let the tempest loose; but the terror passes, and
+their sweet rest is perpetually restored to the pastures and the
+waves. Not so to the mountains. They, which at first seem strengthened
+beyond the dread of any violence or change, are yet also ordained to
+bear upon them the symbol of a perpetual fear. The tremor which fades
+from the soft lake and gliding river is sealed to all eternity upon
+the rock; and while things that pass visibly from birth to death may
+sometimes forget their feebleness, the mountains are made to possess a
+perpetual memorial of their infancy--that infancy which the prophet
+saw in his vision,[24]--"I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without
+form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the
+mountains, and lo, they _trembled_, and all the hills moved
+_lightly_."
+
+[23] Passage written after I had got by some years cooler and wiser than
+when I wrote No. 33, describing however the undulation of the gneiss
+rocks, which, 'where they are, seem, to form the world,' in terms more
+fanciful than I now like.
+
+[24] Utter misinterpretation of the passage. It is the old age, not the
+childhood of earth, which Jeremiah describes in this passage. See its
+true interpretation in 'Fors Clavigera,' Letter XLVI.
+
+
+35. The longer I stayed among the Alps, and the more closely I
+examined them, the more I was struck by the one broad fact of there
+being a vast Alpine plateau, or mass of elevated land, upon which
+nearly all the highest peaks stood like children set upon a table,
+removed, in most cases, far back from the edge of the plateau,--as if
+for fear of their falling; while the most majestic scenes in the Alps
+are produced, not so much by any violation of this law, as by one of
+the great peaks having apparently walked to the edge of the table to
+look over, and thus showing itself suddenly above the valley in its
+full height. This is the case with the Wetterhorn and Eiger at
+Grindelwald, and with the Grande Jorasse above the Col de Ferret. But
+the raised bank or table is always intelligibly in existence, even in
+these apparently exceptional cases; and for the most part, the great
+peaks are not allowed to come to the edge of it, but remain like the
+keeps of castles far withdrawn, surrounded, league beyond league, by
+comparatively level fields of mountain, over which the lapping sheets
+of glacier writhe and flow, foaming about the feet of the dark central
+crests like the surf of an enormous sea-breaker hurled over a rounded
+rock, and islanding some fragment of it in the midst. And the result
+of this arrangement is a kind of division of the whole of Switzerland
+into an upper and lower mountain world,--the lower world consisting of
+rich valleys, bordered by steep, but easily accessible, wooded banks
+of mountain, more or less divided by ravines, through which glimpses
+are caught of the higher Alps; the upper world, reached after the
+first banks of 3,000 or 4,000 feet in height have been surmounted,
+consisting of comparatively level but most desolate tracts of moor and
+rock, half covered by glacier, and stretching to the feet of the true
+pinnacles of the chain. It can hardly be necessary to point out the
+perfect wisdom and kindness of this arrangement, as a provision for
+the safety of the inhabitants of the high mountain regions. If the
+great peaks rose at once from the deepest valleys, every stone which
+was struck from their pinnacles, and every snow-wreath which slipped
+from their ledges, would descend at once upon the inhabitable ground,
+over which no year would pass without recording some calamity of
+earth-slip or avalanche; while in the course of their fall both the
+stones and the snow would strip the woods from the hillsides, leaving
+only naked channels of destruction where there are now the sloping
+meadow and the chestnut glade. Besides this, the masses of snow, cast
+down at once into the warmer air, would all melt rapidly in the
+spring, causing furious inundation of every great river for a month or
+six weeks. The snow being then all thawed, except what lay upon the
+highest peaks in regions of nearly perpetual frost, the rivers would
+be supplied during the summer only by fountains, and the feeble
+tricklings on sunny days from the high snows. The Rhone, under such
+circumstances, would hardly be larger, in summer, than the Severn, and
+many Swiss valleys would be left almost without moisture. All these
+calamities are prevented by the peculiar Alpine structure which has
+been described. The broken rocks and the sliding snow of the high
+peaks, instead of being dashed at once to the vales, are caught upon
+the desolate shelves, or shoulders, which everywhere surround the
+central crests. The soft banks which terminate these shelves,
+traversed by no falling fragments, clothe themselves with richest
+wood, while the masses of snow heaped upon the ledge above them, in a
+climate neither so warm as to thaw them quickly in the spring, nor so
+cold as to protect them from all the power of the summer sun, either
+form themselves into glaciers, or remain in slowly wasting fields even
+to the close of the year,--in either case supplying constant,
+abundant, and regular streams to the villages and pastures beneath,
+and to the rest of Europe, noble and navigable rivers.
+
+Now, that such a structure is the best and wisest possible,[25] is
+indeed sufficient reason for its existence, and to many people it may
+seem useless to question farther respecting its origin. But I can
+hardly conceive any one standing face to face with one of these towers
+of central rock, and yet not also asking himself, Is this indeed the
+actual first work of the Divine Master, on which I gaze? Was the great
+precipice shaped by His finger, as Adam was shaped out of the dust?
+Were its clefts and ledges carved upon it by its Creator, as the
+letters were on the tables of the law, and was it thus left to bear
+its eternal testimony to His beneficence among these clouds of Heaven?
+Or is it the descendant of a long race of mountains, existing under
+appointed laws of birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? There
+can be no doubt as to the answer. The rock itself answers audibly by
+the murmur of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It is _not_ as
+it was once. Those waste leagues around its feet are loaded with the
+wrecks of what it was. On these perhaps, of all mountains, the
+characters of decay are written most clearly; around these are spread
+most gloomily the memorials of their pride, and the signs of their
+humiliation.
+
+[25] Of course I had seen every other tried before giving this
+favourable judgment.
+
+What then were they once? The only answer is yet again--"Behold the
+cloud!"
+
+
+36. There are many spots among the inferior ridges of the Alps, such
+as the Col de Ferret, the Col d'Anterne, and the associated ranges of
+the Buet, which, though commanding prospects of great nobleness, are
+themselves very nearly types of all that is most painful to the human
+mind. Vast wastes of mountain ground,[26] covered here and there with
+dull grey grass or moss, but breaking continually into black banks of
+shattered slate, all glistening and sodden with slow tricklings of
+clogged, incapable streams; the snow-water oozing through them in a
+cold sweat, and spreading itself in creeping stains among their dust;
+ever and anon a shaking here and there, and a handful or two of their
+particles or flakes trembling down, one sees not why, into more total
+dissolution, leaving a few jagged teeth, like the edges of knives
+eaten away by vinegar, projecting, through the half-dislodged mass,
+from the inner rock; keen enough to cut the hand or foot that rests on
+them, yet crumbling as they wound, and soon sinking again into the
+smooth, slippery, glutinous heap; looking like a beach of black scales
+of dead fish cast ashore from a poisonous sea, and sloping away into
+foul ravines, branched down immeasurable slopes of barrenness, where
+the winds howl and wander continually, and the snow lies in wasted and
+sorrowful fields covered with sooty dust, that collects in streaks and
+stains at the bottom of all its thawing ripples.
+
+[26] This is a fourth volume passage,--and I will venture to say of it,
+as Albert Duerer, when he was pleased with his work--that for what it has
+to do, it cannot be much better done. It is a study on the Col de Bon
+Homme.
+
+I know of no other scenes so appalling as these in storm, or so woful
+in sunshine. Where, however, these same rocks exist in more favourable
+positions--that is to say, in gentler banks and at lower
+elevations--they form a ground for the most luxuriant vegetation; and
+the valleys of Savoy owe to them some of their loveliest
+solitudes--exquisitely rich pastures, interspersed with arable and
+orchard land, and shaded by groves of walnut and cherry. Scenes of
+this kind, and of that just described, so singularly opposed, and
+apparently brought together as foils to each other, are however
+peculiar to certain beds of the slaty coherents, which are both vast
+in elevation, and easy of destruction. In Wales and Scotland the same
+groups of rocks possess far greater hardness, while they attain less
+elevation; and the result is a totally different aspect of scenery.
+The severity of the climate, and the comparative durableness of the
+rock, forbid the rich vegetation; but the exposed summits, though
+barren, are not subject to laws of destruction so rapid and fearful as
+in Switzerland, and the natural colour of the rock is oftener
+developed in the purples and greys which, mingled with the heather,
+form the principal elements of the deep and beautiful distant blue of
+the British hills. Their gentler mountain streams also permit the beds
+of rock to remain in firm, though fantastic, forms along their banks,
+and the gradual action of the cascades and eddies upon the slaty
+cleavage produces many pieces of foreground scenery to which higher
+hills can present no parallel.
+
+
+37. Unlike Chamouni Aiguilles, there is no aspect of destruction about
+the Matterhorn cliffs. They are not torn remnants of separating
+spires, yielding, flake by flake, and band by band, to the continual
+process of decay. They are, on the contrary, an unaltered monument,
+seemingly sculptured long ago, the huge walls retaining yet the forms
+into which they were first engraven, and standing like an Egyptian
+temple;--delicately fronted, softly coloured, the suns of uncounted
+ages rising and falling upon it continually, but still casting the
+same line of shadows from east to west; still, century after century,
+touching the same purple stains on the lotus pillars; while the desert
+sand ebbs and flows about their feet, as those autumn leaves of rock
+lie heaped and weak about the base of the Cervin.
+
+Is not this a strange type in the very heart and height of these
+mysterious Alps--these wrinkled hills in their snowy, cold,
+grey-haired old age, at first so silent, then, as we keep quiet at
+their feet, muttering and whispering to us garrulously in broken and
+dreaming fits, as it were, about their childhood,--is it not a strange
+type of the things which "out of weakness are made strong"? If one of
+these little flakes of mica sand, hurried in tremulous spangling along
+the bottom of the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to
+float, almost too small for sight, could have had a mind given to it
+as it was at last borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of
+the stream, and laid, (might it not have been thought?) for a hopeless
+eternity, in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble
+of all earth's atoms; incapable of any use or change; not fit, down
+there in the diluvial darkness, so much as to help an earth wasp to
+build its nest, or feed the first fibre of a lichen; what would it
+have thought, had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength
+as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame,
+out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of God should
+hew that Alpine tower?--that against _it_--poor, helpless mica
+flake!--the wild north winds should rage in vain; beneath
+_it_--low-fallen mica flake!--the snowy hills should lie bowed like
+flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded
+blue; and around _it_--weak, wave-drifted mica flake!--the great war
+of the firmament should burst in thunder and yet stir it not; and the
+fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it
+into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one
+by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed
+its abiding-place on the imperishable spire?
+
+
+
+
+SECTION VI.
+
+ILLUSTRATIVE: STONES.
+
+
+38. There are no natural objects out of which more can be learned than
+out of stones. They seem to have been created especially to reward a
+patient observer. Nearly all other objects in nature can be seen to
+some extent without patience, and are pleasant even in being half
+seen. Trees, clouds, and rivers are enjoyable even by the careless;
+but the stone under his foot has, for carelessness, nothing in it but
+stumbling; no pleasure is languidly to be had out of it, nor food, nor
+good of any kind; nothing but symbolism of the hard heart, and the
+unfatherly gift. And yet, do but give it some reverence and
+watchfulness, and there is bread of thought in it, more than in any
+other lowly feature of all the landscape. For a stone, when it is
+examined, will be found a mountain in miniature. The fineness of
+Nature's work is so great, that into a single block, a foot or two in
+diameter, she can compress as many changes of form and structure, on a
+small scale, as she needs for her mountains on a large one; and taking
+moss for forests, and grains of crystal for crags, the surface of a
+stone in by far the plurality of instances is more interesting than
+the surface of an ordinary hill; more fantastic in form, and
+incomparably richer in colour.
+
+
+39. On a Highland hillside are multitudinous clusters of fern and
+heather; on an Alpine one, multitudinous groves of chestnut and pine.
+The number of the things may be the same, but the sense of infinity is
+in the latter case far greater, because the number is of nobler
+things. Indeed, so far as mere magnitude of space occupied on the
+field of the horizon is the measure of objects, a bank of earth ten
+feet high may, if we stoop to the foot of it, be made to occupy just
+as much of the sky as that bank of mountain at Villeneuve; nay, in
+many respects, its little ravines and escarpments, watched with some
+help of imagination, may become very sufficiently representative to us
+of those of the great mountain; and in classing all water-worn
+mountain ground under the general and humble term of Banks, I mean to
+imply this relationship of structure between the smallest eminences
+and the highest. But in this matter of superimposed _quantity_, the
+distinctions of rank are at once fixed. The heap of earth bears its
+few tufts of moss, or knots of grass; the Highland or Cumberland
+mountain, its honeyed heathers or scented ferns; but the mass of the
+bank at Martigny or Villeneuve has a vineyard in every cranny of its
+rocks, and a chestnut grove on every crest of them.... The minute
+mounds and furrows scattered up the side of that great promontory,
+when they are actually approached after three or four hours' climbing,
+turn into independent hills, with true _parks_ of lovely pasture-land
+enclosed among them, and avenue after avenue of chestnuts, walnuts,
+and pines bending round their bases; while in the deeper dingles,
+populous villages, literally bound down to the rock by enormous trunks
+of vine, which, first trained lightly over the loose stone roofs, have
+in process of years cast their fruitful net over the whole village,
+and fastened it to the ground under their purple weight and wayward
+coils as securely as ever human heart was fastened to earth by the net
+of the Flatterer.
+
+
+40. When a rock of any kind has lain for some time exposed to the
+weather, Nature finishes it in her own way. First she takes wonderful
+pains about its forms, sculpturing it into exquisite variety of dent
+and dimple, and rounding or hollowing it into contours which for
+fineness no human hand can follow; then she colours it; and every one
+of her touches of colour, instead of being a powder mixed with oil, is
+a minute forest of living trees, glorious in strength and beauty, and
+concealing wonders of structure.
+
+
+41. On the broken rocks in the foreground in the crystalline groups,
+the mosses seem to set themselves consentfully and deliberately to the
+task of producing the most exquisite harmonies of colour in their
+power. They will not conceal the form of the rock, but will gather
+over it in little brown bosses, like small cushions of velvet, made of
+mixed threads of dark ruby silk and gold, rounded over more subdued
+films of white and grey, with lightly crisped and curled edges like
+hoar frost on fallen leaves, and minute clusters of upright orange
+stalks with pointed caps, and fibres of deep green, and gold, and
+faint purple passing into black, all woven together, and following
+with unimaginable fineness of gentle growth the undulation of the
+stone they cherish, until it is charged with colour so that it can
+receive no more; and instead of looking rugged, or cold, or stern, or
+anything that a rock is held to be at heart, it seems to be clothed
+with a soft dark leopard's skin, embroidered with arabesque of purple
+and silver.
+
+
+42. The colour of the white varieties of marble is of exquisite
+delicacy, owing to the partial translucency of the pure rock; and it
+has always appeared to me a most wonderful ordinance--one of the most
+_marked_ pieces of purpose in the creation--that all the variegated
+kinds should be comparatively opaque, so as to set off the colour on
+the surface, while the white, which, if it had been opaque, would have
+looked somewhat coarse, (as for instance common chalk does,) is
+rendered just translucent enough to give an impression of extreme
+purity, but not so translucent as to interfere in the least with the
+distinctness of any forms into which it is wrought. The colours of
+variegated marbles are also for the most part very beautiful,
+especially those composed of purple, amber, and green, with white; and
+there seems something notably attractive to the human mind in the
+_vague_ and veined labyrinths of their arrangements.
+
+
+43. I have often had occasion to allude to the apparent connection of
+brilliancy of colour with vigour of life or purity of substance. This
+is pre-eminently the case in the mineral kingdom. The perfection with
+which the particles of any substance unite in crystallization,
+corresponds in that kingdom to the vital power in organic nature; and
+it is a universal law, that according to the purity of any substance,
+and according to the energy of its crystallization, is its beauty or
+brightness. Pure earths are white when in powder; and the same earths,
+which are the constituents of clay and sand, form, when crystallized,
+the emerald, ruby, sapphire, amethyst, and opal.
+
+
+44. As we pass between the hills which have been shaken by earthquake
+and torn by convulsion, we find that periods of perfect repose succeed
+those of destruction. The pools of calm water lie clear beneath their
+fallen rocks, the water-lilies gleam, and the reeds whisper among
+their shadows; the village rises again over the forgotten graves, and
+its church tower, white through the storm-light, proclaims a renewed
+appeal to His protection in whose hand "are all the corners of the
+earth, and the strength of the hills is His also." There is no
+loveliness of Alpine valley that does not teach the same lesson. It is
+just where "the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is
+removed out of his place," that in process of years the fairest
+meadows bloom between the fragments, the clearest rivulets murmur from
+between their crevices among the flowers, and the clustered cottages,
+each sheltered beneath some strength of mossy stone, now to be removed
+no more, and with their pastured flocks around them, safe from the
+eagle's stoop and the wolf's ravin, have written upon their fronts, in
+simple words, the mountaineer's faith in the ancient
+promise,--"Neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction, when it
+cometh; for thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and
+the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee."
+
+
+
+
+SECTION VII.
+
+ILLUSTRATIVE: PLANTS AND FLOWERS.
+
+
+45. Wonderful, in universal adaptation to man's need, desire, and
+discipline, God's daily preparation of the earth for him, with
+beautiful means of life. First, a carpet, to make it soft for him;
+then a coloured fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of
+foliage to shade him from sun-heat, and shade also the fallen rain,
+that it may not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay to nourish
+the springs among the moss. Stout wood to bear this leafage; easily to
+be cut, yet tough and light, to make houses for him, or instruments
+(lance-shaft, or plough-handle, according to his temper); useless it
+had been if harder; useless if less fibrous; useless if less elastic.
+Winter comes, and the shade of leafage falls away, to let the sun warm
+the earth; the strong boughs remain, breaking the strength of winter
+winds. The seeds which are to prolong the race, innumerable according
+to the need, are made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude
+of appeal to the fancy of man, or provision for his service; cold
+juice, or flowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil,
+preserving resin, medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm;
+and all these presented in forms of endless change. Fragility or
+force, softness and strength, in all degrees and aspects; unerring
+uprightness, as of temple pillars, or unguided wandering of feeble
+tendrils on the ground; mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to
+the storms of ages, or wavings to and fro with faintest pulse of
+summer streamlet; roots cleaving the strength of rock, or binding the
+transience of the sand; crests basking in sunshine of the desert, or
+hiding by dripping spring and lightless cave; foliage far tossing in
+entangled fields beneath every wave of ocean--clothing with
+variegated, everlasting films the peaks of the trackless mountains, or
+ministering, at cottage doors, to every gentlest passion and simplest
+joy of humanity.
+
+
+46. If ever in autumn a pensiveness falls upon us, as the leaves drift
+by in their fading, may we not wisely look up in hope to their mighty
+monuments? Behold how fair, how far prolonged in arch and aisle, the
+avenues of the valleys, the fringes of the hills! so stately,--so
+eternal; the joy of man, the comfort of all living creatures, the
+glory of the earth,--they are but the monuments of those poor leaves
+that flit faintly past us to die. Let them not pass, without our
+understanding their last counsel and example: that we also, careless
+of monument by the grave, may build it in the world--monument by which
+men may be taught to remember, not where we died, but where we lived.
+
+
+47. The Pine. Magnificent! nay, sometimes almost terrible. Other
+trees, tufting crag or hill, yield to the form and sway of the ground,
+clothe it with soft compliance, are partly its subjects, partly its
+flatterers, partly its comforters. But the pine rises in serene
+resistance, self-contained; nor can I ever without awe stay long under
+a great Alpine cliff, far from all house or work of men, looking up to
+its companies of pines, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and
+perilous ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like
+the shadow of the one beside it--upright, fixed, spectral, as troops
+of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other, dumb
+for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them: those trees never
+heard human voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. No
+foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs: all comfortless they stand,
+between the two eternities of the Vacancy and the Rock; yet with such
+iron will, that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside
+them,--fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of
+delicate life, and monotony of enchanted pride--unnumbered,
+unconquerable.
+
+Then note farther their perfectness. The impression on most people's
+minds must have been received more from pictures than reality, so far
+as I can judge, so ragged they think the pine; whereas its chief
+character in health is green and full _roundness_. It stands compact,
+like one of its own cones, slightly curved on its sides, finished and
+quaint as a carved tree in some Elizabethan garden; and instead of
+being wild in expression, forms the softest of all forest scenery, for
+other trees show their trunks and twisting boughs; but the pine,
+growing either in luxuriant mass, or in happy isolation, allows no
+branch to be seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or
+down to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there
+is nothing but green cone, and green carpet. Nor is it only softer,
+but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage, for it casts only a
+pyramidal shadow. Lowland forest arches overhead, and chequers the
+ground with darkness; but the pine, growing in scattered groups,
+leaves the glades between emerald-bright. Its gloom is all its own;
+narrowing into the sky, it lets the sunshine strike down to the dew.
+And if ever a superstitious feeling comes over me among the pine
+glades, it is never tainted with the old German forest fear, but it is
+only a more solemn tone of the fairy enchantment that haunts our
+English meadows; so that I have always called the prettiest pine-glade
+in Chamouni, "Fairies' Hollow." It is in the glen beneath the steep
+ascent above Pont Pelissier, and may be reached by a little winding
+path which goes down from the top of the hill[27]--being indeed not
+truly a glen, but a broad ledge of moss and turf, leaning in a
+formidable precipice (which, however, the gentle branches hide) over
+the Arve. An almost isolated rock promontory, many coloured, rises at
+the end of it. On the other sides it is bordered by cliffs, from which
+a little cascade falls, literally, down among the pines, for it is so
+light, shaking itself into mere showers of seed pearl in the sun, that
+the pines don't know it from mist, and grow through it without
+minding. Underneath, there is only the mossy silence; and above, for
+ever, the snow of the nameless Aiguille.
+
+[27] The new road to Chamouni has been carried right through it. A
+cascade on the right, as you ascend, marks the place spoken of in the
+text,--once as lonely as Corrie-nan-shian.
+
+Other trees rise against the sky in dots and knots, but this, in
+fringes. You never see the edges of it, so subtle are they; and for
+this reason,--it alone of trees, so far as I know, is capable of the
+fiery change which has been noticed by Shakespeare. When the sun rises
+behind a ridge crested with pine, provided the ridge be at a distance
+of about two miles, and seen clear, all the trees, for about three or
+four degrees on each side of the sun, become trees of light, seen in
+clear flame against the darker sky, and dazzling as the sun itself. I
+thought at first this was owing to the actual lustre of the leaves;
+but I believe now it is caused by the cloud-dew upon them--every
+minutest leaf carrying its diamond. It seems as if these trees, living
+always among the clouds, had caught part of their glory from them; and
+themselves, the darkest of vegetation, could yet add splendour to the
+sun itself.
+
+
+48. The Swiss have certainly no feelings respecting their mountains in
+anywise correspondent with ours. It was rather as fortresses of
+defence, than as spectacles of splendour, that the cliffs of the
+Rothslock bare rule over the destinies of those who dwelt at their
+feet; and the training for which the mountain children had to thank
+the slopes of the Muotta-Thal, was in soundness of breath, and
+steadiness of limb, far more than in elevation of idea. But the point
+which I desire the reader to note is, that the character of the scene
+which, if any, appears to have been impressive to the inhabitant, is
+not that which we ourselves feel when we enter the district. It was
+not from their lakes, nor their cliffs, nor their glaciers--though
+these were all peculiarly their possessions--that the three venerable
+cantons received their name. They were not called the States of the
+Rock, nor the States of the Lake, but the States of the _Forest_. And
+the one of the three which contains the most touching record of the
+spiritual power of Swiss religion, in the name of the convent of the
+'Hill of Angels,' has, for its own, none but the sweet childish name
+of 'Under the Woods.'
+
+And indeed you may pass under them if, leaving the most sacred spot in
+Swiss history, the Meadow of the Three Fountains, you bid the boatman
+row southward a little way by the shore of the Bay of Uri. Steepest
+there on its western side, the walls of its rocks ascend to heaven.
+Far in the blue of evening, like a great cathedral pavement, lies the
+lake in its darkness; and you may hear the whisper of innumerable
+falling waters return from the hollows of the cliff, like the voices
+of a multitude praying under their breath. From time to time the beat
+of a wave, slow lifted where the rocks lean over the black depth, dies
+heavily as the last note of a requiem. Opposite, green with steep
+grass, and set with chalet villages, the Fron-Alp rises in one solemn
+glow of pastoral light and peace; and above, against the clouds of
+twilight, ghostly on the gray precipice, stand, myriad by myriad, the
+shadowy armies of the Unterwalden pine.
+
+
+49. It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the
+Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of
+thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian
+aqueduct, lighting up the infinity of its arches, like the bridge of
+Chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban Mount, the storm
+swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of
+Albano, and graceful darkness of its ilex grove, rose against pure
+streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flushing
+through the last fragments of rain-cloud in deep palpitating azure,
+half aether and half dew. The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky
+slopes of La Riccia, and their masses of entangled and tall foliage,
+whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand
+evergreens, were penetrated with it, as with rain. I cannot call it
+colour,--it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like
+the curtains of God's Tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the
+valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant
+and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect, or to transmit the
+sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses
+of the valley the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves
+of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their
+banks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air
+around them, breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand
+separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind
+lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden
+floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke, and
+closed above it, as sheet-lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the
+motionless masses of dark rock, dark though flushed with scarlet
+lichen, casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the
+fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and
+fitful sound; and, over all, the multitudinous bars of amber and
+rose--the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to
+illumine--were seen in fathomless intervals between the solemn and
+orbed repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the
+last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless line where the
+Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea.
+
+
+50. Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity:
+children love them; quiet, contented, ordinary people love them as
+they grow; luxurious and disorderly people rejoice in them gathered;
+they are the cottager's treasure; and in the crowded town, mark, as
+with a little broken fragment of rainbow, the windows of the workers
+in whose hearts rests the covenant of peace.
+
+
+51. Yet few people really care about flowers. Many, indeed, are fond
+of finding a new shape of blossom, caring for it as a child cares
+about a kaleidoscope. Many, also, like a fair service of flowers in
+the greenhouse, as a fair service of plate on the table. Many are
+scientifically interested in them, though even these in the
+nomenclature, rather than the flowers; and a few enjoy their
+gardens.... But, the blossoming time of the year being principally
+spring, I perceive it to be the mind of most people, during that
+period, to stay in towns. A year or two ago a keen-sighted and
+eccentrically-minded friend of mine, having taken it into his head to
+violate this national custom, and go to the Tyrol in spring, was
+passing through a valley near Landech with several similarly
+headstrong companions. A strange mountain appeared in the distance,
+belted about its breast with a zone of blue, like our English Queen.
+Was it a blue cloud, a blue horizontal bar of the air that Titian
+breathed in youth, seen now far away, which mortal might never breathe
+again? Was it a mirage--a meteor? Would it stay to be
+approached?--(ten miles of winding road yet between them and the foot
+of the mountain)--such questioning had they concerning it. My
+keen-sighted friend, alone, maintained it to be substantial;--whatever
+it might be, it was not air, and would not vanish. The ten miles of
+road were overpast, the carriage left, the mountain climbed. It stayed
+patiently, expanding still into richer breath and heavenlier glow--a
+belt of gentians. Such things may verily be seen among the Alps in
+spring, and in spring only; which being so, I observe most people
+prefer going in autumn.
+
+
+52. Perhaps few people have ever asked themselves why they admire a
+rose so much more than all other flowers. If they consider, they will
+find, first, that red is, in a delicately gradated state, the
+loveliest of all pure colours; and, secondly, that in the rose there
+is _no shadow_, except what is composed of colour. All its shadows are
+fuller in colour than its lights, owing to the translucency and
+reflective power of the leaves.
+
+
+53. Has the reader ever considered the relations of commonest forms of
+volatile substance? The invisible particles which cause the scent of a
+rose-leaf, how minute, how multitudinous, passing richly away into the
+air continually!
+
+
+54. In the range of inorganic nature I doubt if any object can be
+found more perfectly beautiful, than a fresh, deep snow-drift, seen
+under warm light. Its curves are of inconceivable perfection and
+changefulness; its surface and transparency alike exquisite; its light
+and shade of inexhaustible variety and inimitable finish,--the shadows
+sharp, pale, and of heavenly colour, the reflected lights intense and
+multitudinous, and mingled with the sweet occurrences of transmitted
+light.... If, passing to the edge of a sheet of it upon the lower
+Alps, early in May, we find, as we are nearly sure to find, two or
+three little round openings pierced in it; and through these,
+emergent, a slender, pensive, fragile flower,[28] whose small, dark,
+purple-fringed bell hangs down and shudders over the icy cleft that it
+has cloven, as if partly wondering at its own recent grave, and partly
+dying of very fatigue after its hard-won victory; we shall be, or we
+ought to be, moved by a totally different impression of loveliness
+from that which we receive among the dead ice and the idle clouds:
+there is now uttered to us a call for sympathy, now offered to us an
+image of moral purpose and achievement, which, however unconscious or
+senseless the creature may indeed be that so seems to call, cannot be
+heard without affection, nor contemplated without worship, by any of
+us whose heart is rightly turned, or whose mind is clearly and surely
+sighted.
+
+[28] Soldanella Alpina. I think it is the only Alpine flower which
+actually pierces snow, though I have seen gentians filling thawed
+hoof-prints. Crocuses are languid till they have had sun for a day or
+two. But the soldanella enjoys its snow, at first, and afterwards its
+fields. I have seen it make a pasture look like a large lilac silk gown.
+
+
+55. It has been well shown by Dr. Herbert, that many plants are found
+alone on a certain soil or sub-soil in a wild state, not because such
+soil is favourable to them, but because they alone are capable of
+existing on it, and because all dangerous rivals are by its
+inhospitality removed. Now if we withdraw the plant from this
+position, which it hardly endures, and supply it with the earth and
+maintain about it the temperature that it delights in; withdrawing
+from it, at the same time, all rivals, which in such conditions Nature
+would have thrust upon it, we shall indeed obtain a magnificently
+developed example of the plant, colossal in size, and splendid in
+organization; but we shall utterly lose in it that moral ideal which
+is dependent on its right fulfilment of its appointed functions. It
+was intended and created by the Deity for the covering of those lonely
+spots where no other plant could live. It has been thereto endowed
+with courage and strength, and capacities of endurance; its character
+and glory are not therefore in the gluttonous and idle feeding of its
+own over luxuriance, at the expense of other creatures utterly
+destroyed and rooted out for its good alone; but in its right doing of
+its hard duty, and forward climbing into those spots of forlorn hope
+where it alone can bear witness to the kindness and presence of the
+Spirit that cutteth out rivers among the rocks, as He covers the
+valleys with corn; and there, in its vanward place, and only there,
+where nothing is withdrawn for it, nor hurt by it, and where nothing
+can take part of its honour, nor usurp its throne, are its strength
+and fairness, and price, and goodness in the sight of God to be truly
+esteemed. The first time I saw the Soldanella Alpina, before spoken
+of, it was growing of magnificent size on a sunny Alpine pasture,
+among bleating of sheep, and lowing of cattle, associated with a
+profusion of Geum Montanum, and Ranunculus Pyrenaeus. I noticed it only
+because new to me--nor perceived any peculiar beauty in its cloven
+flower. Some days after, I found it alone, among the rack of the
+higher clouds, and howling of glacier winds; and, as I described it,
+piercing through an edge of avalanche which in its retiring had left
+the new ground brown and lifeless, and as if burnt by recent fire. The
+plant was poor and feeble, and seemingly exhausted with its
+efforts,--but it was then that I comprehended its ideal character, and
+saw its noble function and order of glory among the constellations of
+the earth.
+
+
+56. GRASSES.--Minute, granular, feathery, or downy seed-vessels,
+mingling quaint brown punctuation, and dusty tremors of dancing grain,
+with the bloom of the nearer fields; and casting a gossamered grayness
+and softness of plumy mist along their surfaces far away; mysterious
+evermore, not only with dew in the morning, or mirage at noon, but
+with the shaking threads of fine arborescence, each a little belfry of
+grainbells, all a-chime.
+
+
+57. Gather a single blade of grass, and examine for a minute quietly
+its narrow sword-shaped strip of fluted green. Nothing, as it seems,
+there of notable goodness or beauty. A very little strength and a very
+little tallness, and a few delicate long lines meeting in a
+point,--not a perfect point neither, but blunt and unfinished, by no
+means a creditable or apparently much-cared-for example of Nature's
+workmanship, made, only to be trodden on to-day, and to-morrow to be
+cast into the oven,--and a little pale and hollow stalk, feeble and
+flaccid, leading down to the dull brown fibres of roots. And yet,
+think of it well, and judge whether, of all the gorgeous flowers that
+beam in summer air, and of all strong and goodly trees, pleasant to
+the eyes, or good for food,--stately palm and pine, strong ash and
+oak, scented citron, burdened vine--there be any by man so deeply
+loved, by God so highly graced, as that narrow point of feeble green.
+And well does it fulfil its mission. Consider what we owe merely to
+the meadow grass, to the covering of the dark ground by that glorious
+enamel, by the companies of those soft, and countless, and peaceful
+spears. The fields! Follow forth but for a little time the thoughts of
+all that we ought to recognise in these words. All spring and summer
+is in them--the walks by silent, scented paths--the rests in noonday
+heat,--the joy of herds and flocks,--the power of all shepherd life
+and meditation,--the life of sunlight upon the world falling in
+emerald streaks, and falling in soft blue shadows where else it would
+have struck upon the dark mould, or scorching dust. Pastures beside
+the pacing brooks, soft banks and knolls of lowly hills, thymy slopes
+of down, overlooked by the blue line of lifted sea, crisp lawns, all
+dim with early dew, or smooth in evening warmth of barred sunshine,
+dinted by happy feet, and softening in their fall the sound of loving
+voices,--all these are summed in those simple words; and these are not
+all. We may not measure to the full the depth of this heavenly gift in
+our own land, though still as we think of it longer, the infinite of
+that meadow sweetness, Shakespeare's peculiar joy, would open on us
+more and more; yet we have it but in part. Go out in the springtime
+among the meadows that slope from the shores of the Swiss lakes to the
+roots of their lower mountains. There, mingled with the taller
+gentians, and the white narcissus, the grass grows deep and free; and
+as you follow the winding mountain path, beneath arching boughs, all
+veiled with blossom--paths that for ever droop and rise over the green
+banks and mounds sweeping down in scented undulation steep to the blue
+water, studded here and there with new-mown heaps filling all the air
+with fainter sweetness,--look up towards the higher hills, where the
+waves of everlasting green roll silently into their long inlets among
+the shadows of the pines; and we may perhaps at last know the meaning
+of those quiet words of the 147th Psalm, "He maketh grass to grow upon
+the mountains."
+
+Assembling the images we have traced, and adding the simplest of all,
+from Isaiah xl. 6, we find the grass and flowers are types, in their
+passing, of the passing of human life, and in their excellence, of the
+excellence of human life; and this in twofold way: first by their
+beneficence, and then by their endurance--the grass of the earth, in
+giving the seed of corn, and in its beauty under tread of foot and
+stroke of scythe; and the grass of the waters, in giving its freshness
+for our rest, and in its bending before the wave. But, understood in
+the broad human and Divine sense, the "_herb_ yielding seed"--(as
+opposed to the fruit tree yielding fruit)--includes a third family of
+plants, and fulfils a third office to the human race. It includes the
+great family of the lints and flaxes, and fulfils thus the _three_
+offices of giving food, raiment, and rest. Follow out this fulfilment;
+consider the association of the linen garment and the linen embroidery
+with the priestly office and the furniture of the tabernacle, and
+consider how the rush has been to all time the first natural carpet
+thrown under the human foot. Then next observe the three virtues
+definitely set forth by the three families of plants--not arbitrarily
+or fancifully associated with them, but in all the three cases marked
+for us by Scriptural words: 1st. Cheerfulness, or joyful serenity; in
+the grass for food and beauty--"Consider the lilies of the field, how
+they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin." 2nd. Humility; in the
+grass for rest--"A bruised reed shall he not break." 3rd. Love; in the
+grass for clothing, (because of its swift kindling,)--"The smoking
+flax shall he not quench." And then finally observe the confirmation
+of these last two images in, I suppose, the most important prophecy,
+relating to the future state of the Christian Church, which occurs in
+the Old Testament, namely that contained in the closing chapters of
+Ezekiel. The measures of the Temple of God are to be taken; and
+because it is only by charity and humility that those measures ever
+can be taken, the angel has "a line of _flax_ in his hand, and a
+measuring reed." The use of the line was to measure the land, and of
+the reed to take the dimensions of the buildings; so the buildings of
+the church, or its labours, are to be measured by humility; and its
+territory, or land, by love.
+
+
+58. LEAVES motionless. The strong pines wave above them, and the weak
+grasses tremble beside them; but the blue stars rest upon the earth
+with a peace as of heaven; and far along the ridges of iron rock,
+moveless as they, the rubied crests of Alpine rose flush in the low
+rays of morning.
+
+
+59. MOSSES.--Meek creatures! the first mercy of the earth, veiling
+with hushed softness its dintless rocks; creatures full of pity,
+covering with strange and tender honour the scarred disgrace of ruin,
+laying quiet finger on the trembling stones to teach them rest. No
+words, that I know of, will say what these mosses are. None are
+delicate enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one to
+tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green,--the starred
+divisions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the rock spirits could
+spin porphyry as we do glass,--the traceries of intricate silver, and
+fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fibre
+into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all
+subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of
+grace? They will not be gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet, or
+love-token; but of these the wild bird will make its nest, and the
+wearied child his pillow.
+
+And as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us: when
+all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the soft mosses and
+gray lichen take up their watch by the headstone. The woods, the
+blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done their parts for a time;
+but these do service for ever. Trees for the builder's yard, flowers
+for the bride's chamber, corn for the granary, moss for the grave.
+
+
+60. LICHENS.--As in one sense the humblest, in another they are the
+most honoured of the earth-children. Unfading as motionless, the worm
+frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in loveliness, they
+neither blanch in heat, nor pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered,
+constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark, eternal
+tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris-dyed, the
+tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the
+unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds
+of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted
+snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of its
+cowslip gold,--far above, among the mountains, the silver lichen spots
+rest, star-like, on the stone: and the gathering orange stain, upon
+the edge of yonder western peak, reflects the sunsets of a thousand
+years.
+
+
+
+
+SECTION VIII.
+
+EDUCATION.
+
+
+61. The most helpful and sacred work which can at present be done for
+humanity, is to teach people (chiefly by example, as all best teaching
+must be done) not how "to better themselves," but how to "satisfy
+themselves." It is the curse of every evil nature and evil creature to
+eat and _not_ be satisfied. The words of blessing are, that they shall
+eat and be satisfied; and as there is only one kind of water which
+quenches all thirst, so there is only one kind of bread which
+satisfies all hunger--the bread of justice or righteousness; which
+hungering after, men shall always be filled, that being the bread of
+Heaven; but hungering after the bread or wages of unrighteousness,
+shall not be filled, that being the bread of Sodom. And in order to
+teach men how to be satisfied, it is necessary fully to understand the
+art of joy and humble life--this, at present, of all arts or sciences,
+being the one most needing study. Humble life; that is to say,
+proposing to itself no future exaltation, but only a sweet
+continuance: not excluding the idea of foresight, but wholly of
+fore-sorrow, and taking no troublous thought for coming days; so also
+not excluding the idea of providence or provision, but wholly of
+accumulation;--the life of domestic affection and domestic peace, full
+of sensitiveness to all elements of costless and kind
+pleasure;--therefore chiefly to the loveliness of the natural world.
+
+
+62. We shall find that the love of nature, wherever it has existed,
+has been a faithful and sacred element of feeling; that is to say,
+supposing all the circumstances otherwise the same with respect to two
+individuals, the one who loves nature most will be always found to
+have more capacity for _faith_ in God than the other. Nature-worship
+will be found to bring with it such a sense of the presence and power
+of a Great Spirit as no mere reasoning can either induce or
+controvert; and where that nature-worship is innocently
+pursued--_i.e._, with due respect to other claims on time, feeling,
+and exertion, and associated with the higher principles of
+religion,--it becomes the channel of certain sacred truths, which by
+no other means can be conveyed.
+
+
+63. Instead of supposing the love of nature necessarily connected with
+the faithlessness of the age, I believe it is connected properly with
+the benevolence and liberty[29] of the age; that it is precisely the
+most healthy element which distinctively belongs to us; and that out
+of it, cultivated no longer in levity or ignorance, but in earnestness
+and as a duty, results will spring of an importance at present
+inconceivable; and lights arise, which, for the first time in man's
+history, will reveal to him the true nature of his life, the true
+field for his energies, and the true relations between him and his
+Maker.
+
+[29] I forget, now, what I meant by 'liberty' in this passage; but I
+often used the word in my first writings, in a good sense, thinking of
+Scott's moorland rambles and the like. It is very wonderful to me, now,
+to see what hopes I had once: but Turner was alive, then; and the sun
+used to shine, and rivers to sparkle.
+
+
+64. To any person who has all his senses about him, a quiet walk, over
+not more than ten or twelve miles of road a day, is the most amusing
+of all travelling; and all travelling becomes dull in exact proportion
+to its rapidity.
+
+Going by railroad I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely
+"being sent" to a place, and very little different from becoming a
+parcel.
+
+
+65. I believe an immense gain in the bodily health and happiness of
+the upper classes would follow on their steadily endeavouring, however
+clumsily, to make the physical exertion they now necessarily exert in
+amusements, definitely serviceable. It would be far better, for
+instance, that a gentleman should mow his own fields, than ride over
+other people's.
+
+
+66. In order to define what is fairest, you must delight in what is
+fair; and I know not how few or how many there may be who take such
+delight. Once I could speak joyfully about beautiful things, thinking
+to be understood; now I cannot, any more, for it seems to me that no
+one regards them. Wherever I look or travel, in England or abroad, I
+see that men, wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty. They seem
+to have no other desire or hope but to have large houses, and be able
+to move fast. Every perfect and lovely spot which they can touch, they
+defile. Thus the railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen, and
+that round the Clarens shore of the lake of Geneva, have destroyed the
+power of two pieces of scenery of which nothing can ever supply the
+place, in appeal to the higher ranks of European mind.
+
+
+67. The first thing which I remember as an event in life, was being
+taken by my nurse to the brow of Friar's Crag on Derwentwater. The
+intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in looking through the
+hollows in the mossy roots, over the crag into the dark lake, has
+associated itself more or less with all twining roots of trees ever
+since. Two other things I remember as, in a sort, beginnings of
+life;--crossing Shap-fells, being let out of the chaise to run up the
+hills; and going through Glenfarg, near Kinross, on a winter's
+morning, when the rocks were hung with icicles; these being
+culminating points in an early life of more travelling than is usually
+indulged to a child. In such journeyings, whenever they brought me
+near hills, and in all mountain ground and scenery, I had a pleasure,
+as early as I can remember, and continuing till I was eighteen or
+twenty, infinitely greater than any which has been since possible to
+me in anything.
+
+
+68. A fool always wants to shorten space and time; a wise man wants to
+lengthen both. A fool wants to kill space and time; a wise man, first
+to gain them, then to animate them.
+
+
+69. I suspect that system-makers in general are not of much more use,
+each in his own domain, than, in that of Pomona, the old women who tie
+cherries upon sticks, for the more portableness of the same. To
+cultivate well, and choose well, your cherries, is of some importance;
+but if they can be had in their own wild way of clustering about their
+crabbed stalks, it is a better connection for them than any others;
+and if they cannot, then so that they be not bruised, it makes to a
+boy of practical disposition not much difference whether he gets them
+by handfuls, or in beaded symmetry on the exalting stick.
+
+
+70. Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift
+is to get good out of all things and all persons.
+
+
+71. God appoints to every one of His creatures a separate mission, and
+if they discharge it honourably, if they quit themselves like men, and
+faithfully follow the light which is in them, withdrawing from it all
+cold and quenching influence, there will assuredly come of it such
+burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall shine before men,
+and be of service constant and holy. Degrees infinite of lustre there
+must always be, but the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly
+trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which, worthily used, will be a
+gift also to his race for ever.
+
+
+72. There is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any creature, but it
+is capable of a unity of some kind with other creatures; and in that
+unity is its perfection and theirs, and a pleasure also for the
+beholding of all other creatures that can behold. So the unity of
+spirits is partly in their sympathy, and partly in their giving and
+taking, and always in their love; and these are their delight and
+their strength; for their strength is in their co-working and army
+fellowship, and their delight is in their giving and receiving of
+alternate and perpetual good; their inseparable dependency on each
+other's being, and their essential and perfect depending on their
+Creator's. And so the unity of earthly creatures is their power, and
+their peace; not like the dead and cold peace of undisturbed stones
+and solitary mountains, but the living peace of trust, and the living
+power of support; of hands that hold each other and are still.[30]
+
+[30] A long, affected, and obscure second volume sentence, written in
+imitation of Hooker. One short sentence from Ecclesiastes is the sum of
+it: "How can one be warm alone?"
+
+
+73. It is good to read of that kindness and humbleness of St. Francis
+of Assisi, who spoke never to bird, nor to cicada, nor even to wolf
+and beasts of prey, but as his brother;--and so we find are moved the
+minds of all good and mighty men, as in the lesson that we have from
+the 'Mariner' of Coleridge, and yet more truly and rightly taught in
+the 'Hartleap Well'--
+
+  "Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
+  With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels,"--
+
+and again in the 'White Doe' of Rylstone, with the added teaching,
+that anguish of our own
+
+  "Is tempered and allayed by sympathies
+  Aloft ascending, and descending deep,
+  Even to the inferior kinds;"--
+
+so that I know not of anything more destructive of the whole theoretic
+faculty, not to say of the Christian character and human intellect,[31]
+than those accursed sports in which man makes of himself cat, tiger,
+leopard, and alligator in one; and gathers into one continuance of
+cruelty, for his amusement, all the devices that brutes sparingly and
+at intervals use against each other for their necessities.
+
+[31] I am more and more grieved, as I re-read this and other portions of
+the most affected and weak of all my books, (written in a moulting time
+of my life,)--the second volume of 'Modern Painters,'--at its morbid
+violence of passion and narrowness of thought. Yet, at heart, the book
+was, like my others, honest; and in substance it is mostly good; but all
+boiled to rags.
+
+
+74. He who loves not God, nor his brother, cannot love the grass
+beneath his feet, nor the creatures which live not for his uses,
+filling those spaces in the universe which he needs not: while, on the
+other hand, none can love God, nor his human brother, without loving
+all things which his Father loves; nor without looking upon them every
+one as in that respect his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than
+he, if, in the under concords they have to fill, their part is touched
+more truly.[32]
+
+[32] Morbidly Franciscan, again! and I am really compelled to leave out
+one little bit my friend liked,--as all kindly and hopeful women
+would,--about everything turning out right, and being to some good end.
+For we have no business whatever with the ends of things, but with their
+beings; and their beings are often entirely bad.
+
+
+75. Things may always be seen truly by candid people, though never
+_completely_. No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing; but
+we may see more and more of it the longer we look. Every individual
+temper will see something different in it; but supposing the tempers
+honest, all the differences are there. Every advance in our acuteness
+of perception will show us something new; but the old and
+first-discerned thing will still be there, not falsified, only
+modified and enriched by the new perceptions, becoming continually
+more beautiful in its harmony with them, and more approved as a part
+of the infinite truth.
+
+
+
+
+SECTION IX.
+
+MORALITIES.
+
+
+76. When people read, "The law came by Moses, but grace and truth by
+Christ," do they suppose it means that the law was ungracious and
+untrue? The law was given for a foundation; the grace (or mercy) and
+truth for fulfilment;--the whole forming one glorious Trinity of
+judgment, mercy, and truth.[33] And if people would but read the text
+of their Bibles with heartier purpose of understanding it, instead of
+superstitiously, they would see that throughout the parts which they
+are intended to make most personally their own, (the Psalms,) it is
+always the Law which is spoken of with chief joy. The Psalms
+respecting mercy are often sorrowful, as in thought of what it cost;
+but those respecting the Law are always full of delight. David cannot
+contain himself for joy in thinking of it,--he is never weary of its
+praise: "How love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day. Thy
+testimonies are my delight and my counsellors; sweeter also than honey
+and the honeycomb."
+
+[33] A great deal of the presumption and narrowness caused by my having
+been bred in the Evangelical schools, and which now fill me with shame
+and distress in re-reading 'Modern Painters,' is, to my present mind,
+atoned for by the accurate thinking by which I broke my way through to
+the great truth expressed in this passage, which all my later writings,
+without exception, have been directed to maintain and illustrate.
+
+
+77. I suppose there is no event in the whole life of Christ to which,
+in hours of doubt or fear, men turn with more anxious thirst to know
+the close facts of it, or with more earnest and passionate dwelling
+upon every syllable of its recorded narrative, than Christ's showing
+Himself to His disciples at the Lake of Galilee. There is something
+pre-eminently open, natural, full fronting our disbelief, in this
+manifestation. The others, recorded after the resurrection, were
+sudden, phantom-like, occurring to men in profound sorrow and wearied
+agitation of heart; not, it might seem, safe judges of what they saw.
+But the agitation was now over. They had gone back to their daily
+work, thinking still their business lay net-wards, unmeshed from the
+literal rope and drag. "Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a-fishing.
+They say unto him, We also go with thee." True words enough, and
+having far echo beyond those Galilean hills. That night they caught
+nothing; but when the morning came, in the clear light of it, behold!
+a figure stood on the shore. They were not thinking of anything but
+their fruitless hauls. They had no guess who it was. It asked them
+simply if they had caught anything. They say, No, and it tells them to
+cast again. And John shades his eyes from the morning sun with his
+hand to look who it is; and though the glistening of the sea, too,
+dazzles him, he makes out who it is at last; and poor Simon, not to be
+outrun this time, tightens his fisher's coat about him, and dashes in
+over the nets. One would have liked to see him swim those hundred
+yards, and stagger to his knees upon the beach.
+
+Well, the others get to the beach, too, in time, in such slow way as
+men in general do get in this world to its true shore, much impeded by
+that wonderful "dragging the net with fishes"; but they get
+there--seven of them in all; first the Denier, and then the slowest
+believer, and then the quickest believer, and then the two
+throne-seekers, and two more, we know not who.
+
+They sit down on the shore, face to face with Him, and eat their
+broiled fish as He bids. And then to Peter, all dripping still,
+shivering, and amazed, staring at Christ in the sun, on the other side
+of the coal-fire,--thinking a little perhaps of what happened by
+another coal-fire, when it was colder, and having had no word changed
+with him by his Master, since that look of His,--to him so amazed,
+comes the question, "Simon, lovest thou Me?" Try to feel that a
+little; and think of it till it is true to you: and then take up that
+infinite monstrosity and hypocrisy,--Raphael's cartoon of the charge
+to Peter. Note first the bold fallacy--the putting _all_ the Apostles
+there, a mere lie to serve the Papal heresy of the Petric supremacy,
+by putting them all in the background while Peter receives the charge,
+and making them all witnesses to it. Note the handsomely curled hair
+and neatly tied sandals of the men who had been out all night in the
+sea-mists, and on the slimy decks; note their convenient dresses for
+going a-fishing, with trains that lie a yard along the ground, and
+goodly fringes--all made to match;--an apostolic fishing costume. Note
+how Peter especially, (whose chief glory was in his wet coat _girt_
+about him, and naked limbs,) is enveloped in folds and fringes, so as
+to kneel and hold his keys with grace. No fire of coals at all, nor
+lonely mountain shore, but a pleasant Italian landscape, full of
+villas and churches, and a flock of sheep to be pointed at; and the
+whole group of Apostles, not round Christ, as they would have been
+naturally, but straggling away in a line, that they may be shown. The
+simple truth is, that the moment we look at the picture we feel our
+belief of the whole thing taken away. There is visibly no possibility
+of that group even having existed, in any place, or on any occasion.
+It is all a mere mythic absurdity, and faded concoction of fringes,
+muscular arms, and curly heads of Greek philosophers.
+
+
+78. Among the children of God, there is always that fearful and bowed
+apprehension of His majesty, and that sacred dread of all offence to
+Him which is called the Fear of God; yet of real and essential fear
+there is not any, but clinging of confidence to Him as their Rock,
+Fortress, and Deliverer; and perfect love, and casting out of fear; so
+that it is not possible that, while the mind is rightly bent on Him,
+there should be dread of anything earthly or supernatural; and the
+more dreadful seems the height of His majesty, the less fear they feel
+that dwell in the shadow of it. "Of whom shall I be afraid?"
+
+
+79. If for every rebuke that we utter of men's vices, we put forth a
+claim upon their hearts; if for every assertion of God's demands from
+them, we could substitute a display of His kindness to them; if side
+by side with every warning of death, we could exhibit proofs and
+promises of immortality; if, in fine, instead of assuming the being of
+an awful Deity, which men, though they cannot, and dare not deny, are
+always unwilling, sometimes unable to conceive, we were to show them a
+near, visible, inevitable, but all beneficent Deity, whose presence
+makes the earth itself a heaven, I think there would be fewer deaf
+children sitting in the market-place.
+
+
+80. If not by sympathy discovered, it is not in words explicable with
+what divine lines and light the exercise of godliness and charity will
+mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what
+darkness their departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not
+any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a
+new fairness upon the features.
+
+
+81. The love of the human race is increased by their individual
+differences, and the unity of the creature, made perfect by each
+having something to bestow and to receive, bound to the rest by a
+thousand various necessities and various gratitudes; humility in each
+rejoicing to admire in his fellow that which he finds not in himself,
+and each being in some respect the complement of his race.
+
+
+82. They who are as the angels of God in heaven, yet cannot be
+conceived as so assimilated that their different experiences and
+affections upon earth shall then be forgotten and effectless: the
+child, taken early to his place, cannot be imagined to wear there such
+a body, nor to have such thoughts, as the glorified apostle who had
+finished his course and kept the faith on earth. And so, whatever
+perfections and likeness of love we may attribute to either the tried
+or the crowned creatures, there is the difference of the stars in
+glory among them yet; differences of original gifts, though not of
+occupying till their Lord come; different dispensations of trial and
+of trust, of sorrows and support, both in their own inward, variable
+hearts, and in their positions of exposure or of peace; of the gourd
+shadow and the smiting sun, of calling at heat of day, or eleventh
+hour, of the house unroofed by faith, or the clouds opened by
+revelation; differences in warning, in mercies, in sickness, in signs,
+in time of calling to account; alike only they all are by that which
+is not of them, but the gift of God's unchangeable mercy: "I will give
+unto this last even as unto thee."
+
+
+83. The desire of rest planted in the heart is no sensual, no unworthy
+one; but a longing for renovation, and for escape from a state whose
+every phase is mere preparation for another equally transitory, to one
+in which permanence shall have become possible through perfection.
+Hence the great call of Christ to men, that call on which St.
+Augustine fixed as the essential expression of Christian hope, is
+accompanied by the promise of rest; and the death bequest of Christ to
+men, is peace.
+
+
+84. He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the
+companionship which has been for ever closed, feeling how impotent,
+there, are the wild love, and the keen sorrow, to give one instant's
+pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the
+departed spirit, for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the
+future incur that debt to the heart, which can only be discharged to
+the dust. But the lessons which men receive as individuals, they do
+not learn as nations. Again and again they have seen their noblest
+descend into the grave, and have thought it enough to garland the
+tombstone when they had not crowned the brow, and to pay the honour to
+the ashes, which they had denied to the spirit. Let it not displease
+them that they are bidden, amidst the tumult and the dazzle of their
+busy life, to listen for the few voices, and watch for the few lamps,
+which God has toned and lighted to charm and to guide them, that they
+may not learn their sweetness by their silence, nor their light by
+their decay.
+
+
+85. In the Cathedral of Lucca, near the entrance door of the north
+transept, there is a monument by Jacopo della Quercia to Ilaria di
+Caretto, the wife of Paolo Guinigi. I name it not as more beautiful or
+perfect than other examples of the same period; but as furnishing an
+instance of the exact and right mean between the rigidity and rudeness
+of the earlier monumental effigies, and the morbid imitation of life,
+sleep, or death, of which the fashion has taken place in modern times.
+She is lying on a simple couch, with a hound at her feet; not on the
+side, but with the head laid straight and simply on the hard pillow,
+in which, let it be observed, there is no effort at deceptive
+imitation of pressure.--It is understood as a pillow, but not mistaken
+for one. The hair is bound in a flat braid over the fair brow, the
+sweet and arched eyes are closed, the tenderness of the loving lips is
+set and quiet; there is that about them which forbids breath;
+something which is not death nor sleep, but the pure image of both.
+The hands are not lifted in prayer, neither folded, but the arms are
+laid at length upon the body, and the hands cross as they fall. The
+feet are hidden by the drapery, and the form of the limbs concealed,
+but not their tenderness.
+
+
+86. I do not know any district possessing a more pure or uninterrupted
+fulness of mountain character, (and that of the highest order,) or
+which appears to have been less disturbed by foreign agencies, than
+that which borders the course of the Trient between Valorsine and
+Martigny. The paths which lead to it out of the valley of the Rhone,
+rising at first in steep circles among the walnut trees, like winding
+stairs among the pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over the shoulders
+of the hills into a valley almost unknown, but thickly inhabited by an
+industrious and patient population. Along the ridges of the rocks,
+smoothed by old glaciers into long, dark, billowy swellings, like the
+backs of plunging dolphins, the peasant watches the slow colouring of
+the tufts of moss and roots of herb, which little by little gather a
+feeble soil over the iron substance; then, supporting the narrow slip
+of clinging ground with a few stones, he subdues it to the spade; and
+in a year or two a little crest of corn is seen waving upon the rocky
+casque. The irregular meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among
+these harvested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets that seem
+always to have chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of
+the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as
+the wind takes them with all the grace, but with none of the
+formalism, of fountains; dividing into fanciful change of dash and
+spring, yet with the seal of their granite channels upon them, as the
+lightest play of human speech may bear the seal of past toil, and
+closing back out of their spray to lave the rigid angles, and brighten
+with silver fringes and glassy films each lower and lower step of
+sable stone; until at last, gathered altogether again,--except perhaps
+some chance drops caught on the apple blossom, where it has budded a
+little nearer the cascade than it did last spring,--they find their
+way down to the turf, and lose themselves in that, silently; with
+quiet depth of clear water furrowing among the grass-blades, and
+looking only like their shadows but presently emerging again in little
+startled gushes and laughing hurries, as if they had remembered
+suddenly that the day was too short for them to get down the hill.
+Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing streamlet, all slope
+together in the sunshine towards the brows of ravines, where the pines
+take up their own dominion of saddened shade; and with everlasting
+roar, in the twilight, the stronger torrents thunder down, pale from
+the glaciers, filling all the chasms with enchanted cold, beating
+themselves to pieces against the great rocks that they have themselves
+cast down, and forcing fierce way beneath their ghastly poise. The
+mountain paths stoop to those glens in forky zigzags, leading to some
+grey and narrow arch, all fringed under its shuddering curve with the
+ferns that fear the light; a cross of rough-hewn pine, iron-bound to
+its parapet, standing dark against the lurid fury of the foam. Far up
+the glen, as we pause beside the cross, the sky is seen through the
+openings in the pines thin with excess of light; and, in its clear
+consuming flame of white space, the summits of the rocky mountains are
+gathered into solemn crowns and circlets, all flushed in that strange
+faint silence of possession by the sunshine, which has in it so deep a
+melancholy, full of power, yet as frail as shadows; lifeless, like the
+walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in tender fall of crimson folds,
+like the veil of some sea spirit, that lives and dies as the foam
+flashes; fixed on a perpetual throne, stern against all strength,
+lifted above all sorrows, and yet effaced and melted utterly into the
+air by that last sunbeam that has crossed to them from between the two
+golden clouds.
+
+High above all sorrow? Yes; but not unwitnessing to it. The traveller
+on his happy journey, as his foot springs from the deep turf, and
+strikes the pebbles gaily over the edge of the mountain road, sees
+with a glance of delight the clusters of nut-brown cottages that
+nestle along those sloping orchards, and glow beneath the boughs of
+the pines. Here, it may well seem to him, if there be sometimes
+hardship, there must be at least innocence and peace, and fellowship
+of the human soul with nature. It is not so. The wild goats that leap
+along those rocks have as much passion of joy in all that fair work of
+God as the men that toil among them,--perhaps more. Enter the street
+of one of those villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy
+foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here,
+it is torpor--not absolute suffering--not starvation or disease; but
+darkness of calm enduring: the spring, known only as the time of the
+scythe, and the autumn as the time of the sickle, and the sun only as
+a warmth, the wind as a chill, and the mountains as a danger. They do
+not understand so much as the name of beauty, or of knowledge. They
+understand dimly that of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality,
+faith--these things they know. To glean their meadows side by side, so
+happier; to bear the burden up the breathless mountain flank
+unmurmuringly; to bid the stranger drink from their vessel of milk; to
+see at the foot of their low death-beds a pale figure upon a cross,
+dying, also patiently;--in this they are different from the cattle and
+from the stones; but, in all this, unrewarded, as far as concerns the
+present life. For them, there is neither hope nor passion of spirit;
+for them, neither advance nor exultation. Black bread, rude roof, dark
+night, laborious day, weary arm at sunset; and life ebbs away. No
+books, no thoughts, no attainments, no rest,--except only sometimes a
+little sitting in the sun under the church wall, as the bell tolls
+thin and far in the mountain air; a pattering of a few prayers, not
+understood, by the altar-rails of the dimly gilded chapel,--and so,
+back to the sombre home, with the cloud upon them still unbroken--that
+cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the wild torrents and ruinous
+stones, and unlightened even in their religion, except by the vague
+promise of some better thing unknown, mingled with threatening, and
+obscured by an unspeakable horror--a smoke, as it were, of martyrdom,
+coiling up with the incense; and amidst the images of tortured bodies
+and lamenting spirits in hurtling flames, the very cross, for them,
+dashed more deeply than for others with gouts of blood.
+
+
+87. A Highland scene is beyond doubt pleasant enough in its own way;
+but, looked close at, has its shadows.[34] Here, for instance, is the
+very fact of one--as pretty as I can remember,--having seen many. It
+is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by
+jutting rocks, and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one side of it
+to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream, drooping into
+quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval field, and then,
+first islanding a purple and white rock with an amber pool, it dashes
+away into a narrow fall of foam under a thicket of mountain ash and
+alder. The autumn sun, low, but clear, shines on the scarlet
+ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and
+there, when the breeze has not caught them, rest quiet in the crannies
+of the purple rock. Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket,
+the carcase of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to
+the bone, its white ribs protruding through the skin, raven-torn; and
+the rags of its wool still flickering from the branches that first
+stayed it as the stream swept it down. A little lower, the current
+plunges, roaring, into a circular chasm like a well, surrounded on
+three sides by a chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which
+the foam slips in detached snow-flakes. Round the edges of the pool
+beneath, the water circles slowly like black oil; a little butterfly
+lies on its back, the wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs
+feebly quivering; a fish arises, and it is gone. Lower down the
+stream, I can see over a knoll the green and damp turf roofs of four
+or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the
+cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by
+a few ill-set stepping stones, with here and there a flat slab on the
+tops, where they have sunk out of sight;--and at the turn of the brook
+I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog--a picturesque and pretty
+group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving. I
+know them, and I know the dog's ribs also, which are nearly as bare as
+the dead ewe's; and the child's wasted shoulders, cutting his old
+tartan jacket through, so sharp are they.
+
+[34] Passage written to be opposed to an exuberant description, by an
+amiable Scottish pastor, of everything flattering to Scotchmen in the
+Highlands. I have put next to it, a little study of the sadness of
+Italy.
+
+
+88. Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the
+solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the
+reader imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and
+motion of the living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and
+wasted plain. The earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he
+never so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow, and carious,
+like the dusty wreck of the bones of men. The long knotted grass waves
+and tosses feebly in the evening wind, and the shadows of its motion
+shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the
+sunlight. Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around him, as if the
+dead beneath were struggling in their sleep. Scattered blocks of black
+stone, four-square remnants of mighty edifices, not one left upon
+another, lie upon them to keep them down. A dull purple poisonous haze
+stretches level along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of massy
+ruins, on whose rents the red light rests, like dying fire on defiled
+altars; the blue ridge of the Alban Mount lifts itself against a
+solemn space of green, clear, quiet sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds
+stand steadfastly along the promontories of the Apennines. From the
+plain to the mountains, the shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier,
+melt into the darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral
+mourners, passing from a nation's grave.
+
+
+89. I was coming down one evening from the Rochers de Naye, above
+Montreux, having been at work among the limestone rocks, where I could
+get no water, and both weary and thirsty. Coming to a spring at the
+turn of the path, conducted, as usual, by the herdsmen, into a
+hollowed pine trunk, I stooped to it, and drank deeply. As I raised my
+head, drawing breath heavily, some one behind me said, "Celui qui
+boira de cette eau-ci, aura encore soif." I turned, not understanding
+for a moment what was meant, and saw one of the hill peasants,
+probably returning to his chalet from the market place at Vevay or
+Villeneuve. As I looked at him with an uncomprehending expression, he
+went on with the verse: "Mais celui qui boira de l'eau que je lui
+donnerai, n'aura jamais soif."
+
+
+90. It may perhaps be permitted me[35] to mark the significance of the
+earliest mention of mountains in the Mosaic books; at least of those
+in which some Divine appointment or command is stated respecting them.
+They are first brought before us as refuges for God's people from the
+two judgments of water and fire. The Ark rests upon the mountains of
+Ararat; and man, having passed through the great Baptism unto death,
+kneels upon the earth first where it is nearest heaven, and mingles
+with the mountain clouds the smoke of his sacrifice of thanksgiving.
+Again; from the midst of the first judgment by fire, the command of
+the Deity to His servant is, "Escape to the mountain;" and the morbid
+fear of the hills, which fills any human mind after long stay in
+places of luxury and sin, is strangely marked in Lot's complaining
+reply, "I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me." The
+third mention, in way of ordinance, is a far more solemn one: "Abraham
+lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off." "The Place," the
+mountain of myrrh, or of bitterness, chosen to fulfil to all the seed
+of Abraham, far off and near, the inner meaning of promise regarded in
+that vow: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh
+mine help." And the fourth is the delivery of the law on Sinai. It
+seemed then to the monks that the mountains were appointed by their
+Maker to be to man refuges from judgment, signs of redemption, and
+altars of sanctification and obedience; and they saw them afterwards
+connected, in the manner the most touching and gracious, with the
+death, after his task had been accomplished, of the first anointed
+Priest; the death, in like manner, of the first inspired Lawgiver; and
+lastly, with the assumption of His office, by the Eternal Priest,
+Lawgiver, and Saviour.
+
+[35] With reference to the choice of mountain dwellings by the greater
+monastic orders.
+
+Observe the connection of these three events. Although the _time_ of
+the deaths of Aaron and Moses was hastened by God's displeasure, we
+have not, it seems to me, the slightest warrant for concluding that
+the _manner_ of their deaths was intended to be grievous or
+dishonourable to them. Far from this, it cannot, I think, be doubted
+that in the denial of the permission to enter the Promised Land, the
+whole punishment of their sin was included; and that, as far as
+regarded the manner of their deaths, it must have been appointed for
+them by their Master, in all tenderness and love, and with the full
+purpose of ennobling the close of their service upon the earth. It
+might have seemed to _us_ more honourable that both should have been
+permitted to die beneath the shadow of the Tabernacle, the
+congregation of Israel watching by their side; and all whom they loved
+gathered together to receive the last message from the lips of the
+meek lawgiver, and the last blessing from the prayer of the anointed
+priest. But it was not thus they were permitted to die. Try to realize
+that going forth of Aaron from the midst of the congregation. He who
+had so often done sacrifice for their sin, going forth now to offer up
+his own spirit. He who had stood among them between the dead and the
+living, and had seen the eyes of all that great multitude turned to
+him, that by his intercession their breath might yet be drawn a moment
+more, going forth now to meet the angel of death face to face, and
+deliver himself into his hand. Try if you cannot walk in thought with
+those two brothers, and the son, as they passed the outmost tents of
+Israel, and turned, while yet the dew lay round about the camp,
+towards the slopes of Mount Hor; talking together for the last time,
+as step by step they felt the steeper rising of the rocks, and hour
+after hour, beneath the ascending sun, the horizon grew broader as
+they climbed, and all the folded hills of Idumea, one by one subdued,
+showed, amidst their hollows in the haze of noon, the windings of that
+long desert journey, now at last to close. But who shall enter into
+the thoughts of the High Priest as his eye followed those paths of
+ancient pilgrimage; and through the silence of the arid and endless
+hills, stretching even to the dim peak of Sinai, the whole history of
+those forty years was unfolded before him, and the mystery of his own
+ministries revealed to him; and that other Holy of Holies, of which
+the mountain peaks were the altars, and the mountain clouds the veil,
+the firmament of his Father's dwelling, opened to him still more
+brightly and infinitely as he drew nearer his death?--until at last,
+on the shadeless summit, from him on whom sin was to be laid no more,
+from him on whose heart the names of sinful nations were to press
+their graven fire no longer, the brother and the son took breastplate
+and ephod, and left him to his rest. There is indeed a secretness in
+this calm faith, and deep restraint of sorrow, into which it is
+difficult for us to enter; but the death of Moses himself is more
+easily to be conceived, and had in it circumstances still more
+touching as regards the influence of the external scene. For forty
+years Moses had not been alone. The care and burden of all the people,
+the weight of their woe, and guilt, and death, had been upon him
+continually. The multitude had been laid upon him as if he had
+conceived them; their tears had been his meat night and day, until he
+had felt as if God had withdrawn His favour from him, and he had
+prayed that he might be slain, and not see his wretchedness. And now
+at last the command came, "Get thee up into this mountain." The weary
+hands, that had been so long stayed up against the enemies of Israel,
+might lean again upon the shepherd's staff, and fold themselves for
+the shepherd's prayer--for the shepherd's slumber. Not strange to his
+feet, though forty years unknown, the roughness of the bare mountain
+path, as he climbed from ledge to ledge of Abarim; not strange to his
+aged eyes the scattered clusters of the mountain herbage, and the
+broken shadows of the cliffs, indented far across the silence of
+uninhabited ravines; scenes such as those among which, as now, with
+none beside him but God, he had led his flocks so often; and which he
+had left, how painfully! taking upon him the appointed power to make
+of the fenced city a wilderness, and to fill the desert with songs of
+deliverance. It was not to embitter the last hours of his life that
+God restored to him for a day the beloved solitudes he had lost, and
+breathed the peace of the perpetual hills around him, and cast the
+world in which he had laboured, and sinned, far beneath his feet in
+that mist of dying blue;--all sin, all wandering, soon to be forgotten
+for ever. The Dead Sea--a type of God's anger understood by him, of
+all men, most clearly, who had seen the earth open her mouth, and the
+sea his depth, to overwhelm the companies of those who contended with
+his Master--laid waveless beneath him; and beyond it the fair hills of
+Judah, and the soft plains and banks of Jordan, purple in the evening
+light as with the blood of redemption, and fading in their distant
+fulness into mysteries of promise and of love. There, with his
+unabated strength, his undimmed glance, lying down upon the utmost
+rocks, with angels waiting near to contend for the spoils of his
+spirit, he put off his earthly armour. We do deep reverence to his
+companion prophet, for whom the chariot of fire came down from heaven;
+but was his death less noble whom his Lord Himself buried in the vales
+of Moab, keeping, in the secrets of the eternal counsels, the
+knowledge of a sepulchre, from which he was to be called in the
+fulness of time, to talk with that Lord upon Hermon of the death that
+He should accomplish at Jerusalem?
+
+And lastly, let us turn our thoughts for a few moments to the cause of
+the resurrection of these two prophets. We are all of us too much in
+the habit of passing it by, as a thing mystical and inconceivable,
+taking place in the life of Christ for some purpose not by us to be
+understood, or, at the best, merely as a manifestation of His divinity
+by brightness of heavenly light, and the ministering of the spirits of
+the dead, intended to strengthen the faith of His three chosen
+apostles. And in this, as in many other events recorded by the
+Evangelists, we lose half the meaning, and evade the practical power
+upon ourselves, by never accepting in its fulness the idea that our
+Lord was "perfect man,"--"tempted in all things like as we are." Our
+preachers are continually trying, in all manner of subtle ways, to
+explain the union of the Divinity with the Manhood--an explanation
+which certainly involves first their being able to describe the nature
+of Deity itself, or, in plain words, to comprehend God. They never can
+explain, in any one particular, the union of the natures; they only
+succeed in weakening the faith of their hearers as to the entireness
+of either. The thing they have to do is precisely the contrary of
+this--to insist upon the _entireness_ of both. We never think of
+Christ enough as God, never enough as Man; the instinctive habit of
+our minds being always to miss of the Divinity, and the reasoning and
+enforced habit to miss of the humanity. We are afraid to harbour in
+our own hearts, or to utter in the hearing of others, any thought of
+our Lord as hungering, tired, sorrowful, having a human soul, a human
+will, and affected by events of human life, as a finite creature is:
+and yet one half of the efficiency of His atonement, and the whole of
+the efficiency of His example, depend on His having been this to the
+full. Consider, therefore, the Transfiguration as it relates to the
+human feelings of our Lord. It was the first definite preparation for
+His death. He had foretold it to His disciples six days before; then
+takes with Him the three chosen ones into "an high mountain apart."
+From an exceeding high mountain, at the first taking on Him the
+ministry of life, He had beheld and rejected the kingdoms of the
+earth, and their glory: now, on a high mountain, He takes upon Him the
+ministry of death. Peter and they that were with Him, as in
+Gethsemane, were heavy with sleep. Christ's work had to be done alone.
+
+The tradition is that the Mount of Transfiguration was the summit of
+Tabor; but Tabor is neither a high mountain, nor was it in any sense a
+mountain "_apart_," being in those years both, inhabited and
+fortified. All the immediately preceding ministries of Christ had been
+at Cesarea Philippi. There is no mention of travel southward in the
+six days that intervened between the warning given to His disciples
+and the going up into the hill. What other hill could it be than the
+southward slope of that goodly mountain, Hermon, which is indeed the
+centre of all the Promised Land, from the entering in of Hamath unto
+the river of Egypt; the mount of fruitfulness, from which the springs
+of Jordan descended to the valleys of Israel? Along its mighty forest
+avenues, until the grass grew fair with the mountain lilies, His feet
+dashed in the dew of Hermon, He must have gone to pray His first
+recorded prayer about death; and from the steep of it, before He
+knelt, could see to the south all the dwellings of the people that had
+sat in darkness, and seen the great light, the land of Zabulon and of
+Naphtali, Galilee of the nations,--could see, even with His human
+sight, the gleam of that lake by Capernaum and Chorazin, and many a
+place loved by Him, and vainly ministered to, whose house was now left
+unto them desolate; and chief of all, far in the utmost blue, the
+hills above Nazareth, sloping down to His old home; hills on which yet
+the stones lay loose that had been taken up to cast at Him when He
+left them for ever.
+
+"And as He prayed, two men stood by Him." Among the many ways in which
+we miss the help and hold of Scripture, none is more subtle than our
+habit of supposing that, even as man, Christ was free from the fear of
+death. How could He then have been tempted as we are?--since among all
+the trials of the earth, none spring from the dust more terrible than
+that fear. It had to be borne by Him, indeed, in a unity which we can
+never comprehend, with the foreknowledge of victory,--as His sorrow
+for Lazarus with the consciousness of His power to restore him; but it
+_had_ to be borne, and that in its full earthly terror; and the
+presence of it is surely marked for us enough by the rising of those
+two at His side. When, in the desert, He was girding Himself for the
+work of life, angels of life came and ministered to Him; now in the
+fair world, when He is girding Himself for the work of death, the
+ministrants come to Him from the grave. But, from the grave,
+conquered. One from that tomb under Abarim, which His own hand had
+sealed long ago; the other, from the rest into which he had entered
+without seeing corruption. "There stood by Him Moses and Elias, and
+spake of His decease." Then, when the prayer is ended, the task
+accepted, first, since the star paused over Him at Bethlehem, the full
+glory falls upon Him from heaven, and the testimony is borne to His
+everlasting Sonship and power. "Hear ye Him."
+
+If, in their remembrance of these things, and in their endeavour to
+follow in the footsteps of their Master, religious men of bygone days,
+closing themselves in the hill solitudes, forgot sometimes, and
+sometimes feared, the duties they owed to the active world, we may
+perhaps pardon them more easily than we ought to pardon ourselves, if
+we neither seek any influence for good, nor submit to it unsought, in
+scenes to which thus all the men whose writings we receive as
+inspired, together with their Lord, retired whenever they had any task
+or trial laid upon them needing more than their usual strength of
+spirit. Nor perhaps should we have unprofitably entered into the mind
+of the earlier ages, if among our other thoughts, as we watch the
+chains of the snowy mountains rise on the horizon, we should sometimes
+admit the memory of the hour in which their Creator, among their
+solitudes, entered on His travail for the salvation of our race; and
+indulge the dream, that as the flaming and trembling mountains of the
+earth seem to be the monuments of the manifesting of His terror on
+Sinai, these pure and white hills, near to the heaven, and sources of
+all good to the earth, are the appointed memorials of that light of
+His mercy, that fell, snowlike, on the Mount of Transfiguration.
+
+
+FINIS.
+
+Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
+
+Edinburgh & London
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Frondes Agrestes, by John Ruskin
+
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