|
|
|
|
|
|
78 PRÆTERITA-I
I got little satisfaction and less praise by these works; but the native architectural instinct is instantly developed in these,-highly notable for any one who cares to note such nativities. Two little pencillings from Canterbury south porch and central tower, I have given to Miss Gale, of Burgate House, Canterbury; the remnants of the book itself to Mrs. Talbot, of Tyn-y-Ffynon, Barmouth, both very dear friends.1
86. But before everything, at this time, came my pleasure in merely watching the sea. I was not allowed to row, far less to sail, nor to walk near the harbour alone; so that I learned nothing of shipping or anything else worth learning, but spent four or five hours every day in simply staring and wondering at the sea,-an occupation which never failed me till I was forty. Whenever I could get to a beach it was enough for me to have the waves to look at, and hear, and pursue and fly from. I never took to natural history of shells, or shrimps, or weeds, or jelly-fish. Pebbles?-yes, if there were any; otherwise, merely stared all day long at the tumbling and creaming strength of the sea. Idiotically, it now appears to me, wasting all that priceless youth in mere dream and trance of admiration; it had a certain strain of Byronesque passion in it, which meant something: but it was a fearful loss of time.
87. The summer of 1832 must, I think, have been passed at home, for my next sketch-book contains only some efforts at tree-drawing in Dulwich, and a view of the bridge over the now bricked-up “Effra,”2 by which the Norwood road then crossed it at the bottom of Herne Hill: the road itself, just at the place where, from the top of the bridge, one looked up and down the streamlet, bridged now into putridly damp shade by the railway, close to Herne Hill Station. This sketch was the first in which
1 [For Miss Gale, whose brother Frederick married a sister of Mr. Arthur Severn, see Vol. XXXIII. p. xxiv.; for Mrs. Talbot, and the name of her house, Vol. XXX. p. xxviii., and Vol. XXIX. p. 173 n.]
2 [See above, p. 35.]
|
|
|
[Version 0.04: March 2008]
