VII. MACUGNAGA 367

childhood any time when the plots of the great plays were unknown to me, or-I write the word now with more than surprise-misunderstood! I thought and felt about all of them then, just as I think and feel now; no character, small or great, has taken a new aspect to me; and the attentive reading which began first at Macugnaga meant only the discovery of a more perfect truth, or a deeper passion, in the words that had before rung in my ears with too little questioned melody. As for the full contents of any passage, or any scene, I never expected, nor expect, to know them, any more than every rock of Skiddaw, or flower of Jura.

135. But by the light of the little window at Macugnaga, and by the murmur of the stream beneath it, began the courses of study which led me into fruitful thought, out of the till then passive sensation of merely artistic or naturalist life; and which have made of me-or at least I fain would believe the friends who tell me so-a useful teacher, instead of a vain labourer.

From that time forward, nearly all serious reading was done while I was abroad; the heaviest box in the boot being always full of dictionaries; and my Denmark Hill life resolved itself into the drudgery of authorship and press correction, with infinite waste of time in saying the same things over and over to the people who came to see our Turners.

In calling my authorship, drudgery, I do not mean that writing ever gave me the kind of pain of which Carlyle so wildly complains,-to my total amazement and boundless puzzlement, be it in passing said; for he talked just as vigorously as he wrote, and the book he makes bitterest moan over,¹ Friedrich, bears the outer aspect of richly enjoyed gossip, and lovingly involuntary eloquence of description or praise. My own literary work, on the contrary, was always done as quietly and methodically as a piece of

¹ [See, for instance, vol. ii. pp. 172, 173, of Froude’s Carlyle’s Life in London (1885).]

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