CHAPTER V

PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON¹

96. I HAVE allowed, in the last chapter, my record of boyish achievements and experiments in art to run on to a date much in advance of the early years which were most seriously eventful for me in good and evil. I resume the general story of them with the less hesitation, because, such as it is, nobody else can tell it; while, in later years, my friends in some respects know me better than I know myself.

The second decade of my life was cut away still more sharply from the perfectly happy time of childhood, by the death of my Croydon aunt; death of “cold” literally, caught in some homely washing operations in an east wind. Her brown and white spaniel, Dash, lay beside her body, and on her coffin, till they were taken away from him; then he was brought to Herne Hill, and I think had been my companion some time before Mary came to us.²

With the death of my Croydon aunt ended for me all the days by Wandel streams, as at Perth by Tay; and thus when I was ten years old, an exclusively Herne Hilltop life set in (when we were not travelling), of no very beneficial character.³

97. My Croydon aunt left four sons-John, William, George, and Charles; and two daughters-Margaret and

¹ [For “the bard of Plynlimmon,” see below, p. 555.]

² [The MS. adds:-

“I had the measles somewhere about the same date; we were going to Dover that summer, and I recollect my mother’s keeping me quiet in the bed in my nursery by telling me to ‘think of Dash and Dover.”’

Ruskin, forgetting that he had omitted the passage on revise, refers to it below, p. 467.]

³ [The MS. adds: “In the first place the religious training became extremely vague and dim. My father, who was still much broken ...” (as in § 79 above, p. 71).]

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