376 PRÆTERITA-II

again a day or two afterwards, when I stopped on a cloudless afternoon at Nyon, where the road branches away for Paris. I had to say good-bye to Mont Blanc-there visible in his full cone, through the last gap given by the Chablais mountains as they rise eastward along the lake-shore.

Six months before, I had rhymed to his snows¹ in such hope and delight, and assurance of doing everything I wanted, this year at last; and now, I had only discovered wants that any number of years could not satisfy; and weaknesses, which no ardour of effort or patience of practice could overcome.

Thus, for the first time, measuring some of the outer bastions of the unconquerable world, I opened my English letters; which told me that my eldest Croydon cousin, John,² in whose prosperity and upward rounding of fortune’s wheel all of us had been confident, was dead in Australia.

So much stronger than I, and so much more dutiful, working for his people in the little valley of Wandel, out in the great opposite desolate country; and now the dust of it laid on him, as on his brother the beach-sand on this side the sea.³ There was no grief, for me, in his loss, so little had I known, and less remembered, him; but much awe, and wonder, when all the best and kindest of us were thus struck down, what my own selfish life was to come to, or end in.

147. With these thoughts and fears fastening on me, as I lost sight first of Mont Blanc, and then of the lines of Jura, and saw the level road with its aisle of poplars in perspective vista of the five days between Dijon and Calais, the fever returned slightly, with a curious tingling, and yet partly, it seemed to me, deadness of sensation, in the throat, which would not move, for better nor worse, through the

¹ [See Vol. II. p. 233. The poem (which is quoted below, p. 473) was completed in June 1845, but presumably first written in April at Nyon, whither Ruskin returned in November.]

² [See above, i. § 98 (p. 88).]

³ [See above, i. § 158 (p. 137).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]