VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE 149

every hour becoming more and more shadowy and impossible. I rejoiced in all stories of Pallas and Venus, of Achilles and Aeneas, of Elijah and St. John: but, without doubting in my heart that there were real spirits of wisdom and beauty, nor that there had been invincible heroes and inspired prophets, I felt already, with fatal and increasing sadness, that there was no clear utterance about any of them-that there were for me neither Goddess guides nor prophetic teachers; and that the poetical histories, whether of this world or the next, were to me as the words of Peter to the shut up disciples-“as idle tales; and they believed them not.”¹

173. But here at last I had found a man who spoke only of what he had seen, and known; and spoke without exaggeration, without mystery, without enmity, and without mercy. “That is so;-make what you will of it!”² Shakespeare said the Alps voided their rheum on the valleys,³ which indeed is precisely true, with the final truth, in that matter, of James Forbes,⁴-but it was told in a mythic manner, and with an unpleasant British bias to the nasty. But Byron, saying that “the glacier’s cold and restless mass moved onward day by day,”⁵ said plainly what he saw and knew,-no more. So also, the Arabian Nights had told me of thieves who lived in enchanted caves, and beauties who fought with genii in the air; but Byron told me of thieves with whom he had ridden on their own hills, and of the fair Persians or Greeks who lived and died under the very sun that rose over my visible Norwood hills.

And in this narrow, but sure, truth, to Byron, as already to me, it appeared that Love was a transient thing, and Death a dreadful one. He did not attempt to console me

¹ [See Luke xxiv. 11. Ruskin, quoting from memory, makes here one of his rare Bible slips; it is the words of the women, not of Peter, which were not believed.]

² [Compare the chapter in Modern Painters on the “Pathetic Fallacy”: Vol. V. pp. 213, 214.]

³ [Henry V., Act iii. sc. 5.]

⁴ [On this subject, see Vol. XXVI. pp. xxxiii. seq.]

⁵ [Manfred, Act i. sc. 1: compare Vol. I. p. 202, and Vol. XXXIV. p. 725.]

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