VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN 115

dined at four, as usual, and the evening being entirely fine, went out to walk, all of us,-my father and mother and Mary and I.

We must have still spent some time in town-seeing, for it was drawing towards sunset, when we got up to some sort of garden promenade-west of the town, I believe; and high above the Rhine, so as to command the open country across it to the south and west. At which open country of low undulation, far into blue,-gazing as at one of our own distances from Malvern of Worcestershire, or Dorking of Kent,-suddenly-behold-beyond!

134. There was no thought in any of us for a moment of their being clouds.¹ They were clear as crystal, sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by the sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought or dreamed,-the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful to us; not more awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death.

It is not possible to imagine, in any time of the world, a more blessed entrance into life, for a child of such a temperament as mine. True, the temperament belonged to the age: a very few years,-within the hundred,-before that, no child could have been born to care for mountains, or for the men that lived among them, in that way. Till Rousseau’s time, there had been no “sentimental” love of nature;² and till Scott’s no such apprehensive love of “all sorts and conditions of men,”³ not in the soul merely, but in the flesh. St. Bernard of La Fontaine,⁴ looking out to Mont Blanc with his child’s eyes, sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna; St. Bernard of Talloires, not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta. But for me, the Alps and their people were alike beautiful in

¹ [See Ruskin’s verses--“The Alps! the Alps! it is no cloud,” etc., Vol. II. p. 367.]

² [Compare Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 92 (Vol. XII. p. 120).]

³ [Book of Common Prayer (1662).]

⁴ [For the birthplace at La Fontaine, near Dijon, of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, see Vol. XXXIII. p. 247. Compare the anecdote referred to in Vol. V. p. 363, and Vol. XI. p. 51.]

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