94 PRÆTERITA-I

which were indeed natural and delightful to me. I have above registered their beginnings in the sparry walks at Matlock:¹ but my father’s business also took him often to Bristol, where he placed my mother, with Mary and me, at Clifton. Miss Edgeworth’s story of Lazy Lawrence,² and the visit to Matlock by Harry and Lucy, gave an almost romantic and visionary charm to mineralogy in those dells; and the piece of iron oxide with bright Bristol diamonds,³-No. 51 of the Brantwood collection,-was I think the first stone on which I began my studies of silica. The diamonds of it were bright with many an association besides, since from Clifton we nearly always crossed to Chepstow,-the rapture of being afloat, for half-an-hour even, on that muddy sea, concentrating into these impressive minutes the pleasures of a year of other boys’ boating, -and so round by Tintern and Malvern, where the hills, extremely delightful in themselves to me because I was allowed to run free on them, there being no precipices to fall over nor streams to fall into, were also classical to me through Mrs. Sherwood’s Henry Milner, a book which I loved long, and respect still.⁴ So that there was this of curious and precious in the means of my education in these years, that my romance was always ratified to me by the seal of locality-and every charm of locality spiritualized by the glow and the passion of romance.

107. There was one district, however, that of the Cumberland lakes, which needed no charm of association to deepen the appeal of its realities. I have said somewhere⁵ that my first memory in life was of Friar’s Crag on Derwentwater;-meaning, I suppose, my first memory of things afterwards chiefly precious to me; at all events,

¹ [See § 83, p. 75.]

² [The first story in The Parent’s Assistant; its scene is laid near Clifton. For “Harry and Lucy’s” visit to Matlock, see Harry and Lucy Concluded, 1825, vol. i. pp. 252 seq.]

³ [Ruskin refers to this acquisition in Fors, Letter 3 (Vol. XXVII. p. 62). For another reference to it, see ii. § 2 (below, p. 243).]

⁴ [See Ruskin’s appreciation of it in Modern Painters, vol. iv.(Vol. VI. p. 406 n.).]

⁵ [Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvii. § 13 (Vol. V. p. 365). Compare Ruskin’s verses of 1830 on the spot: Vol. II. p. 294.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]