VII. MACUGNAGA 371

the restlessness of ambition, or the strain of effort, or anxiety about money matters, taint or disturb the peace of a painter’s travels: but Harding did not wish, or perhaps think it possible, to do better than, to his own mind, he always did; while I had no hope of becoming a second Turner, and no thoughts of becoming a thirtieth Academician. Harding was sure of regular sale for his summer’s work, and under no difficulty in dividing the hotel bills with me: we both enjoyed the same scenes, though in different ways, which gave us subjects of surprising but not antagonistic talk: the weather was perfect, the roads smooth, and the inns luxurious.

140. I must not yet say more of Verona, than that, though truly Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa have been the centres of thought and teaching to me,¹ Verona has given the colouring to all they taught. She has virtually represented the fate and the beauty of Italy to me; and whatever concerning Italy I have felt, or been able with any charm or force to say, has been dealt with more deeply, and said more earnestly, for her sake.²

It was only for Harding’s sake that I went on to Venice, that year; and, for the first week there, neither of us thought of anything but the market and fishing boats, and effects of light on the city and the sea; till, in the spare hour of one sunny but luckless day, the fancy took us to look into the Scuola di San Rocco. Hitherto, in hesitating conjectures of what might have been, I have scarcely ventured to wish, gravely, that it had been. But, very earnestly, I should have bid myself that day keep out

¹ [See above, i. § 180 (p. 156).]

² [The MS. has an additional passage here:-

“The days spent at Verona in 1845 passed, however, in mere happy activity, drawing what I best could in alliance with Harding, whose sketches were always perfectly faithful, in his manner and according to his outsight-insight he had not; but of the plainly then visible and material Verona, the records he made were most precious, and are so, if yet they are at all. Nothing has amazed or grieved me more in the eager rush and outcry of recent art than the vanishing into silence and darkness of everything that was well done in its early days.”

Compare the account of Harding in the Epilogue of 1883: Vol. IV. p. 353.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]