62 PRÆTERITA-I

as Burd Helen, the Twa Corbies,¹ or any other rhyme or story which sought its interest in vain love or fruitless death.²

But true, pure, and ennobling sadness began very early to mingle its undertone with the constant happiness of those days;-a ballad music, beautiful in sincerity, and hallowing them like cathedral chant. Concerning which,-I must go back now to the days I have only heard of with the hearing of the ear, and yet of which some are to me as if mine eyes had seen³ them.

69.⁴ It must have been a little after 1780⁵ that my paternal grandmother, Catherine Tweddale, ran away with my paternal grandfather when she was not quite sixteen; and my aunt Jessie, my father’s only sister, was born a year afterwards; a few weeks after which event, my grandmother, not yet seventeen, was surprised (by a friend who came into her room unannounced) dancing a threesome reel, with two chairs for her partners; she having found at the moment no other way of adequately expressing the pleasure she took in this mortal life, and its gifts and promises.

The latter failed somewhat afterwards; and my aunt Jessie, a very precious and perfect creature, beautiful in her dark-eyed, Highland way,-utterly religious, in her quiet Puritan way,-and very submissive to Fates mostly unkind, was married to a somewhat rough tanner, with a fairly good business in the good town of Perth: and, when I was old enough to be taken first to visit them, my aunt and my uncle the tanner lived in a square-built grey stone house in the suburb of Perth known as “Bridge-End,” the house some fifty yards north of the bridge; its garden sloping steeply to the Tay, which eddied, three or four feet

¹ [For “Burd Helen,” see Vol. XIV. p. 85 n.; for the “Twa Corbies,” Modern Painters, vol. iii. (Vol. V. p. 315).]

² [In which respect, Ruskin shared his father’s distaste: see Fiction, Fair and Foul, passim and e.g. §§ 8, 9, 14 n. (Vol. XXXIV. pp. 271, 272, 278).]

³ [Psalms xviii. 44 (marginal version); 2 Chronicles ix. 6.]

⁴ [§§ 69-73 are put together, with revisions, from Fors Clavigera, Letters 63, §§ 11, 13, 14, and 65, §§ 17-19: see the Bibliographical Note, p. xcii.]

⁵ [The actual date is 1781.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]