CH. VI THE LAMP OF MEMORY 223

lovely as the vine; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places; and in the more open ground, the vetch, and comfrey, and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes¹ moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music;* the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing.² Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had

* Yet not all their light, nor all its music. Cf. Modern Painters, vol. ii. sec. 1, chap. iv. sub. sec. 8.3

¹ [An expression much in favour with Ruskin in his earlier pieces: see references collected at Vol. II. p. 62 n.]

² [The MS. has, “things whose memorial is more precious than their being.” And below, “dyed and made sacred by...”]

³ [This was note 15 at end of the book in eds 1 and 2; omitted in later editions. The note was an afterthought of the author; see letter to W. H. Harrison, in Appendix i., p. 276.]

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