THE OPENING

OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE

CONSIDERED IN SOME OF ITS RELATIONS TO

THE PROSPECTS OF ART

1. I READ the account in the Times newspaper of the opening of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham as I ascended the hill between Vevay and Châtel St. Denis,¹ and the thoughts which it called up haunted me all day long, as my road wound among the grassy slopes of the Simmenthal. There was a strange contrast between the image of that mighty palace, raised so high above the hills on which it is built as to make them seem little less than a basement for its glittering stateliness, and those low larch huts, half hidden beneath their coverts of forest, and scattered like grey stones along the masses of far-away mountain. Here, man contending with the powers of Nature for his existence; there commanding them for his recreation: here, a feeble folk nested among the rocks with the wild goat and the coney,² and retaining the same quiet thoughts from generation to generation; there, a great multitude triumphing in the splendour of immeasurable habitation, and haughty with hope of endless progress and irresistible power.

2. It is indeed impossible to limit, in imagination, the beneficent results which may follow from the undertaking

¹ [The opening of the Palace by Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort was on June 10, 1854. Ruskin was in Switzerland with his parents at the time. In the middle of June they went from Vevay to Thun, by the Simmenthal; Châtel St. Denis is about ten miles on the road from Vevay.]

²[See Proverbs xxx. 26.]

417

XII. 2 D

[Version 0.04: March 2008]