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VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN 113
by traverse of the hilly road of the Black Forest, the gates of
Schaffhausen itself, before they closed for the night.
The Black Forest! The fall of Schaffhausen! The chain of the Alps! within one’s grasp for Sunday! What a Sunday, instead of customary Walworth and the Dulwich fields! My impassioned petition at last carried it, and the earliest morning saw us trotting over the bridge of boats to Kehl, and in the eastern light I well remember watching the line of the Black Forest hills enlarge and rise, as we crossed the plain of the Rhine. “Gates of the hills”;1 opening for me to a new life-to cease no more, except at the Gates of the Hills whence one returns not.
131. And so, we reached the base of the Schwarzwald, and entered an ascending dingle; and scarcely, I think, a quarter of an hour after entering, saw our first “Swiss cottage.”* How much it meant to all of us,-how much prophesied to me, no modern traveller could the least conceive, if I spent days in trying to tell him. A sort of triumphant shriek-like all the railway whistles going off at once at Clapham Junction-has gone up from the Fooldom of Europe at the destruction of the myth of William Tell.2 To us, every word of it was true-but mythically luminous with more than mortal truth; and here, under the black woods, glowed the visible, beautiful, tangible testimony to it in the purple larch timber, carved to exquisiteness by the joy of peasant life, continuous, motionless there in the pine shadow on its ancestral turf,-unassailed and unassailing, in the blessedness of righteous poverty, of religious peace.
The myth of William Tell is destroyed forsooth? and
* Swiss, in character and real habit-the political boundaries are of no moment.3
1 [The title given by Ruskin to his engraving of Turner’s “Pass of Faido,” the frontispiece to the fourth volume of Modern Painters (Vol. VI.).]
3 [Compare Vol. XIII. p. 511, Vol. XVIII. p. 538, Vol. XX. p. 382, and Vol. XXII. p. 270.]
3 [Compare what Ruskin says of a “Swiss” cottage in Prout’s drawing of Strassburg: Vol. XIV. p. 416.]
XXXV. H
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
