474 PRÆTERITA-III

Alas for man! who hath no sense

Of gratefulness nor confidence,

But still regrets and raves,

Till all God’s love can scarcely win

One soul from taking pride in sin,

And pleasure over graves.

Yet teach me, God, a milder thought,

Lest I, of all Thy blood has bought,

Least honourable be;

And this, that leads me to condemn,

Be rather want of love for them

Than jealousy for Thee.

1. These verses,¹ above noticed (ii. § 109), with one following sonnet, as the last rhymes I attempted in any seriousness, were nevertheless themselves extremely earnest, and express, with more boldness and simplicity than I feel able to use now with my readers, the real temper in which I began the best work of my life. My mother at once found fault with the words “sanguine stain,” as painful, and untrue of the rose-colour on snow at sunset; but they had their meaning to myself,-the too common Evangelical phrase, “washed in the blood of Christ,”² being, it seemed to me, if true at all, true of the earth and her purest snow, as well as of her purest creatures; and the claim of being able to find among the rock-shadows thoughts such as hermits of old found in the desert, whether it seem immodest or not, was wholly true. Whatever might be my common faults or weaknesses, they were rebuked among the hills; and the only days I can look back to as, according to the powers given me, rightly or wisely in entireness spent, have been in sight of Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, or the Jungfrau.

When I was most strongly under this influence, I tried

¹ [First printed in Ruskin’s Poems, 1850: see now Vol. II. pp. 233-235. Ruskin here omits a stanza which in the Poems preceded the last. For the “one following sonnet” (“The Glacier”), see Vol. II. p. 240. The statement that these were “the last rhymes attempted in any seriousness” requires some little modification: see the few pieces of later years given in Vol. II. pp. 243-250, though it is true that most of them were playful or written for music.]

² [See Revelation vii. 14.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]