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220 PRÆTERITA-I
the feeling, but in the mixture of it. I had, in my little clay pitcher, vialfuls, as it were, of Wordsworth’s reverence, Shelley’s sensitiveness, Turner’s accuracy, all in one. A snowdrop was to me, as to Wordsworth, part of the Sermon on the Mount; but I never should have written sonnets to the celandine, because it is of a coarse yellow, and imperfect form. With Shelley, I loved blue sky and blue eyes, but never in the least confused the heavens with my own poor little Psychidion.1 And the reverence and passion were alike kept in their places by the constructive Turnerian element; and I did not weary myself in wishing that a daisy could see the beauty of its shadow,2 but in trying to draw the shadow rightly, myself.3
246. But so stubborn and chemically inalterable the laws of the prescription were, that now, looking back from 1886 to that brook shore of 1837, whence I could see the whole of my youth, I find myself in nothing whatsoever changed. Some of me is dead, more of me stronger. I have learned a few things, forgotten many; in the total of me, I am but the same youth, disappointed and rheumatic.
And in illustration of this stubbornness, not by stiffening of the wood with age, but in the structure of the pith, let me insist a minute or two more on the curious joy I felt in 1837 in returning to the haunts of boyhood. No boy could possibly have been more excited than I was by seeing Italy and the Alps; neither boy nor man ever knew better the difference between a Cumberland cottage and Venetian palace, or a Cumberland stream and the Rhone:- my very knowledge of this difference will be found next year expressing itself in the first bit of promising literary
1 [For the references to Wordsworth, see-for a snowdrop circlet suggesting “the Spirit of Paradise,” the lines quoted in Vol. XXXIV. p. 387; and for another reference to Wordsworth’s lines “To the Lesser Celandine,” Vol. IV. p. 150. And for the references to Shelley, see, e.g., Prometheus, ii. 1, 114 (“Thine eyes are like the deep, blue, boundless vault of heaven”), and the Epipsychidion generally.]
2 [Wordsworth, the lines beginning, “So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive”; often quoted by Ruskin: see, e.g., Vol. III. p. 177.]
3 [For a passage which followed here in the MS., see the Appendix, p. 608.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
