116 PRÆTERITA-I

their snow, and their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any spirits in heaven but the clouds.

135. Thus, in perfect health of life and fire of heart, not wanting to be anything but the boy I was, not wanting to have anything more than I had; knowing of sorrow only just so much as to make life serious to me, not enough to slacken in the least its sinews; and with so much of science mixed with feeling as to make the sight of the Alps not only the revelation of the beauty of the earth, but the opening of the first page of its volume,-I went down that evening from the garden-terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful. To that terrace, and the shore of the Lake of Geneva, my heart and faith return to this day, in every impulse that is yet nobly alive in them, and every thought that has in it help or peace.¹

136. The morning after that Sunday’s eve at Schaffhausen was also cloudless, and we drove early to the falls, seeing again the chain of the Alps by morning light, and learning, at Lauffen, what an Alpine river was. Coming out of the gorge of Balsthal,² I got another ever memorable sight of the chain of the Alps, and these distant views, never seen by the modern traveller, taught me, and made me feel, more than the close marvels of Thun and Interlachen. It was again fortunate that we took the grandest pass into Italy,-that the first ravine of the main Alps I saw was the Via Mala, and the first lake of Italy, Como.

We took boat on the little recessed lake of Chiavenna,

¹ [Here in the MS. is the following additional passage:-

“This morning I read for the first time in Ernest Chesneau’s Chefs d’École the life and death of Géricault. It taught me, as nothing else could, the happiness of the circumstances surrounding my own boyhood, as distinguished from those which polluted and crushed the child’s existence of him whose after life was summed in the sentence, ‘He never painted a woman, a child, or the sun.’”

The book is La Peinture Française au XIX^e Siècle: Les Chefs d’Ecole (Paris, 1862). The remark about Géricault (“Géricault n’a peint ni femme, ni enfant, ni Soleil”) is at p. 135.]

² [Near Soleure. Ruskin saw this view on his second visit to Switzerland in 1835.]

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