XII. OTTERBURN 467

235. I did not in last Præterita enough explain the reason for my seeking homes on the crests of Alps,¹ in my own special study of cloud and sky; but I have only known too late, within this last month,² the absolutely literal truth of Turner’s saying that the most beautiful skies in the world known to him were those of the Isle of Thanet.

In a former number of Præterita I have told how my mother kept me quiet in a boy’s illness by telling me to think of Dash, and Dover;³ and among the early drawings left for gift to Joanie are all those made-the first ever made from nature-at Sevenoaks,⁴ Tunbridge, Canterbury, and Dover. One of the poorest-nothings of these, a mere scrawl in pen and ink, of cumulus cloud crossed by delicate horizontal bars on the horizon, is the first attempt I ever made to draw a sky,-fifty-five years ago. That same sky I saw again over the same sea horizon at sunset only five weeks ago. And three or four days of sunshine following, I saw, to my amazement, that the skies of Turner were still bright above the foulness of smoke-cloud or the flight of plague-cloud; and that the forms which, in the pure air of Kent and Picardy, the upper cirri were capable of assuming, undisturbed by tornado, unmingled with volcanic exhalation, and lifted out of the white crests of ever-renewed tidal waves, were infinite, lovely and marvellous beyond any that I had ever seen from moor or alp; while yet on the horizon, if left for as much as an hour undefiled by fuel of fire, there was the azure air I had known of old, alike in the lowland distance and on the Highland hills. What might the coasts of France and England have been now, if from the days of Bertha in Canterbury, and of Godefroy in Boulogne, the Christian faith had been held by both nations in peace, in

¹ [See above, p. 436.]

² [See the date at the end of the chapter.]

³ [The passage of which Ruskin was here thinking was, however, omitted on revision: see now p. 87 n.]

⁴ [This was in 1831. The drawing was No. 6 in the Ruskin Exhibition at Coniston, 1900. On the back is written, “I believe my very first study from nature.”]

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