I. THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE 493

Nevertheless, the great passages in the Old Testament regarding its observance held their power over me, nor have ceased to do so; but the inveterate habit of being unhappy all Sunday¹ did not in any way fulfil the order to call the Sabbath a delight.²

I have registered the year 1858 as the next, after 1845, in which I had complete guidance of myself. Couttet met me at Basle, and I went on to Rhein felden with great joy, and stayed to draw town and bridges completely (two of the studies are engraved in Modern Painters³).

21. I think it was the second Sunday there, and no English church. I had read the service with George,⁴ and gone out afterwards alone for a walk up a lovely dingle on the Black Forest side of the Rhine, where every pretty cottage was inscribed, in fair old German characters, with the date of its building, the names of the married pair who had built it, and a prayer that, with God’s blessing, their habitation of it, and its possession by their children, might be in righteousness and peace. Not in these set terms, of course, on every house, but in variously quaint verses or mottoes, meaning always as much as this.⁵

Very happy in my Sunday walk, I gathered what wild flowers were in their first springing, and came home with a many-coloured cluster, in which the dark-purple orchis was chief. I had never examined its structure before, and by this afternoon sunlight did so with care; also it seemed to me wholly right to describe it as I examined; and to draw the outlines as I described, though with a dimly alarmed consciousness of its being a new fact in existence for me, that I should draw on Sunday.

22. Which thenceforward I continued to do, if it seemed to me there was due occasion. Nevertheless, come to pass how it might, the real new fact in existence for me was

¹ [See above, p. 25.]

² [Isaiah lviii. 13.]

³ [See Plates 83 and 84: Vol. VII. pp. 436-437.]

⁴ [See above, p. 346.]

⁵ [For notices of such house mottoes, see Vol. VIII. p. 229.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]