CHAPTER VII

PAPA AND MAMMA

139. THE work to which, as partly above described, I set myself during the year 1834 under the excitement remaining from my foreign travels, was in four distinct directions, in any one of which my strength might at that time have been fixed by definite encouragement. There was first the effort to express sentiment in rhyme; the sentiment being really genuine, under all the superficial vanities of its display; and the rhymes rhythmic, only without any ideas in them. It was impossible to explain, either to myself or other people, why I liked staring at the sea,¹ or scampering on a moor; but, one had pleasure in making some sort of melodious noise about it, like the waves themselves, or the peewits. Then, secondly, there was the real love of engraving, and of such characters of surface and shade as it could give. I have never seen drawing, by a youth, so entirely industrious in delicate line; and there was really the making of a fine landscape, or figure outline, engraver in me. But fate having ordered otherwise, I mourn the loss to engraving less than that before calculated, or rather incalculable, one, to geology.² Then there was, thirdly, the violent instinct for architecture; but I never could have built or carved anything, because I was without power of design;³ and have perhaps done as much in that direction as it was worth doing with so limited faculty.⁴ And then, fourthly, there was the unabated, never to be abated, geological instinct, now fastened

¹ [See above, § 86, p. 78.]

² [See above, § 109, p. 96.]

³ [Compare below, p. 304 (§ 64).]

⁴ [In writing, the Seven Lamps and the Stones of Venice; in drawings of architectural subjects, innumerable; and, perhaps he means also, in suggestions made for the Oxford Museum (see Vol. XVI.).]

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