No More Learning

"Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit
shall be hewn down, and cast into the fire. " Yes, verily: to
be baptized with fire or to be cast therein,—it is the choice set
before all men. The march notes still murmur through the grated
window, and mingle with the sounding in our ears of the sen-
tence of judgment which the old Greek has written on that
Baptistery wall. Venice has made her choice.
He who lies under that stony canopy would have taught her
another choice, in his day, if she would have listened to him;
but he and his counsels have long been forgotten by her, and the
dust lies upon his lips.
Through the heavy door whose bronze network closes the
place of his rest, let us enter the church itself. It is lost in
still deeper twilight, to which the eye must be accustomed for
some moments before the form of the building can be traced;
and then there opens before us a vast cave, hewn out into the
form of a cross, and divided into shadowy aisles by many pil-
lars. Round the domes of its roof the light enters only through
narrow apertures like large stars; and here and there a ray
or two from some far-away casement wanders into the darkness,
and casts a narrow phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble
that heave and fall in a thousand colors along the floor. What
else there is of light is from torches, or silver lamps, burning


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ceaselessly in the recesses of the chapels: the roof sheeted with
gold, and the polished walls covered with alabaster, give back at
every curve and angle some feeble gleaming to the flames; and
the glories round the heads of the sculptured saints flash out
upon us as we pass them, and sink again into the gloom. Under
foot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery,
one picture passing into another, as in a dream; forms beautiful
and terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and raven-
ing beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them
drink from running fountains and feed from vases of crystal: the
passions and the pleasures of human life symbolized together, and
the mystery of its redemption; for the mazes of interwoven lines
and changeful pictures lead always at last to the Cross, lifted and
carved in every place and upon every stone; sometimes with the
serpent of eternity wrapt round it, sometimes with doves beneath
its arms and sweet herbage growing forth from its feet; but
conspicuous most of all on the great rood that crosses the church
before the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the shadow of
the apse.
And although in the recesses of the isles and chapels,
when the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see contin-
ually a figure traced in faint lines upon their marble,—a woman
standing with her eyes raised to heaven, and the inscription.
above her "Mother of God," she is not here the presiding
deity. It is the Cross that is first seen, and always, burning in
the centre of the temple; and every dome and hollow of its roof
has the figure of Christ in the utmost height of it, raised in
power, or returning in judgment.
Nor is this interior without effect on the minds of the people.
At every hour of the day there are groups collected before the
various shrines, and solitary worshipers scattered through the
darker places of the church,-evidently in prayer both deep
and reverent, and for the most part profoundly sorrowful. The
devotees at the greater number of the renowned shrines of Ro-
manism may be seen murmuring their appointed prayers with
wandering eyes and unengaged gestures: but the step of the
stranger does not disturb those who kneel on the pavement of
St. Mark's; and hardly a moment passes, from early morning to
sunset, in which we may not see some half-veiled figure enter
beneath the Arabian porch, cast itself into long abasement on
the floor of the temple, and then, rising slowly with more con-
firmed step, and with a passionate kiss and clasp of the arms
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JOHN RUSKIN
given to the feet of the crucifix, by which the lamps burn always
in the northern aisle, leave the church as if comforted.
But we must not hastily conclude from this that the nobler
characters of the building have at present any influence in fos-
tering a devotional spirit. There is distress enough in Venice to
bring many to their knees, without excitement from external
imagery; and whatever there may be in the temper of the wor-
ship offered in St. Mark's more than can be accounted for by
reference to the unhappy circumstances of the city, is assuredly
not owing either to the beauty of its architecture or to the
impressiveness of the Scripture histories embodied in its mosaics.
That it has a peculiar effect, however slight, on the popular
mind, may perhaps be safely conjectured from the number of
worshipers which it attracts, while the churches of St. Paul and
the Frari, larger in size and more central in position, are left
comparatively empty. But this effect is altogether to be ascribed
to its richer assemblage of those sources of influence which
address themselves to the commonest instincts of the human
mind, and which, in all ages and countries, have been more or
less employed in the support of superstition. Darkness and mys-
tery; confused recesses of building; artificial light employed in
small quantity, but maintained with a constancy which seems to
give it a kind of sacredness; preciousness of material easily
comprehended by the vulgar eye; close air loaded with a sweet
and peculiar odor associated only with religious services, solemn
music, and tangible idols or images having popular legends at-
tached to them,- these, the stage properties of superstition, which
have been from the beginning of the world, and must be to the
end of it, employed by all nations, whether openly savage or
nominally civilized, to produce a false awe in minds incapable of
apprehending the true nature of the Deity, are assembled in St.
Mark's to a degree, as far as I know, unexampled in any other
European church. The arts of the Magus and the Brahmin
are exhausted in the animation of a paralyzed Christianity; and
the popular sentiment which these arts excite is to be regarded
by us with no more respect than we should have considered our-
selves justified in rendering to the devotion of the worshipers at
Eleusis, Ellora, or Edfou.
Indeed, these inferior means of exciting religious emotion
were employed in the ancient Church as they are at this day;
but not employed alone. Torchlight there was, as there is now;


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12539
but the torchlight illumined Scripture histories on the walls,
which every eye traced and every heart comprehended, but which,
during my whole residence in Venice, I never saw one Venetian
regard for an instant. I never heard from any one the most
languid expression of interest in any feature of the church, or
perceived the slightest evidence of their understanding the mean-
ing of its architecture; and while therefore the English cathedral,
though no longer dedicated to the kind of services for which it
was intended by its builders, and much at variance in many of
its characters with the temper of the people by whom it is now
surrounded, retains yet so much of its religious influence that no
prominent feature of its architecture can be said to exist alto-
gether in vain, we have in St. Mark's a building apparently still
employed in the ceremonies for which it was designed, and yet
of which the impressive attributes have altogether ceased to be
comprehended by its votaries. The beauty which it possesses is
unfelt, the language it uses is forgotten; and in the midst of the
city to whose service it has so long been consecrated, and still
filled by crowds of the descendants of those to whom it owes its
magnificence, it stands in reality more desolate than the ruins.
through which the sheep-walk passes unbroken in our English
valleys; and the writing on its marble walls is less regarded and
less powerful for the teaching of men than the letters which the
shepherd follows with his finger, where the moss is lightest on
the tombs in the desecrated cloister.
CALAIS SPIRE
From Modern Painters'
THE
HE essence of picturesque character has been already defined
to be a sublimity not inherent in the nature of the thing,
but caused by something external to it; as the ruggedness
of a cottage roof possesses something of a mountain aspect, not
belonging to the cottage as such. And this sublimity may be
either in mere external ruggedness and other visible character,
or it may lie deeper, in an expression of sorrow and old age,
attributes which are both sublime; not a dominant expression,
but one mingled with such familiar and common characters as
prevent the object from becoming perfectly pathetic in its sor-
row, or perfectly venerable in its age.


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JOHN RUSKIN
1
For instance, I cannot find words to express the intense
pleasure I have always in first finding myself, after some pro-
longed stay in England, at the foot of the old tower of Calais
church. The large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; the
record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of weak-
ness or decay; its stern wasteness and gloom, eaten away by the
Channel winds and overgrown with the bitter sea grasses; its
slates and tiles all shaken and rent, and yet not falling; its
desert of brickwork full of bolts and holes and ugly fissures,
and yet strong, like a bare brown rock; its carelessness of what
any one thinks or feels about it,-putting forth no claim, having
no beauty nor desirableness, pride nor grace, yet neither asking
for pity; not, as ruins are, useless and piteous, feebly or fondly
garrulous of better days, but useful still, going through its own
daily work, as some old fisherman beaten gray by storm, yet
drawing his daily nets: so it stands, with no complaint about its
past youth, in blanched and meagre massiveness and serviceable-
ness, gathering human souls together underneath it; the sound
of its bells for prayer still rolling through its rents; and the
gray peak of it seen far across the sea, principal of the three
that rise above the waste of surfy sand and hillocked shore,-
the lighthouse for life, and the belfry for labor, and this for
patience and praise.
I cannot tell the half of the strange pleasures and thoughts
that come about me at the sight of that old tower: for in some
sort, it is the epitome of all that makes the Continent of Europe
interesting, as opposed to new countries; and above all, it com-
pletely expresses that agedness in the midst of active life which
binds the old and the new into harmony. We in England have
our new street, our new inn, our green shaven lawn, and our
piece of ruin emergent from it,-a mere specimen of the Middle
Ages put on a bit of velvet carpet to be shown, which but for
its size might as well be on the museum shelf at once, under
cover. But on the Continent the links are unbroken between
the past and present, and in such use as they can serve for, the
gray-headed wrecks are suffered to stay with men; while in un-
broken line the generations of spared buildings are seen succeed-
ing each in its place. And thus in its largeness, in its permitted
evidence of slow decline, in its poverty, in its absence of all pre-
tense, of all show and care for outside aspect, that Calais tower
has an infinite of symbolism in it, all the more striking because
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12541
usually seen in contrast with English scenes expressive of feel-
ings the exact reverse of these.
And I am sorry to say that the opposition is most distinct
in that noble carelessness as to what people think of it. Once,
on coming from the Continent, almost the first inscription I saw
in my native English was this:
―
"TO LET, A GENTEEL HOUSE UP THIS ROAD"
And it struck me forcibly, for I had not come across the idea of
gentility, among the upper limestones of the Alps, for seven
onths; nor do I think that the Continental nations in general
have the idea. They would have advertised a "pretty" house,
or a "large" one, or a "convenient " one; but they could not,
by any use of the terms afforded by their several languages,
have got at the English "genteel. " Consider a little all the
meanness that there is in that epithet, and then see, when next
you cross the Channel, how scornful of it that Calais spire will
look.
Of which spire the largeness and age are also opposed exactly
to the chief appearances of modern England, as one feels them
on first returning to it: that marvelous smallness both of houses
and scenery, so that a plowman in the valley has his head on
a level with the tops of all the hills in the neighborhood; and a
house is organized into complete establishment — parlor, kitchen,
and all, with a knocker to its door, and a garret window to its
roof, and a bow to its second story-on a scale of twelve feet
wide by fifteen high, so that three such at least would go into
the granary of any ordinary Swiss cottage; and also our serenity
of perfection, our peace of conceit, everything being done that
vulgar minds can conceive as wanting to be done; the spirit of
well-principled housemaids everywhere exerting itself for perpet-
ual propriety and renovation, so that nothing is old, but only
" old-fashioned," and contemporary, as it were, in date and im-
pressiveness, only with last year's bonnets. Abroad, a building of
the eighth or tenth century stands ruinous in the open street;
the children play round it, the peasants heap their corn in it, the
buildings of yesterday nestle about it, and fit their new stones
into its rents, and tremble in sympathy as it trembles.
No one
wonders at it, or thinks of it as separate, and of another time;
we feel the ancient world to be a real thing, and one with the
new antiquity is no dream; it is rather the children playing
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JOHN RUSKIN
about the old stones that are the dream. But all is continuous,
and the words "from generation to generation" understandable
there. Whereas here we have a living present, consisting merely
of what is "fashionable" and "old-fashioned"; and a past of
which there are no vestiges; a past which peasant or citizen can
no more conceive-all equally far away-Queen Elizabeth as
old as Queen Boadicea, and both incredible. At Verona we look
out of Can Grande's window to his tomb; and if he does not
stand beside us, we feel only that he is in the grave instead of
the chamber,—not that he is old, but that he might have been
beside us last night. But in England the dead are dead to pur-
pose.
One cannot believe they ever were alive, or anything else
than what they are now,-names in schoolbooks.
Then that spirit of trimness. The smooth paving-stones; the
scraped, hard, even, rutless roads; the neat gates and plates,
and essence of border and order, and spikiness and spruceness.
Abroad, a country-house has some confession of human weakness
and human fates about it. There are the old grand gates still,
which the mob pressed sore against at the Revolution, and the
strained hinges have never gone so well since; and the broken
greyhound on the pillar-still broken-better so: but the long
avenue is gracefully pale with fresh green, and the court-yard
bright with orange-trees; the garden is a little run to waste,-
since Mademoiselle was married nobody cares much about it;
and one range of apartments is shut up,-nobody goes into them
since Madame died. But with us, let who will be married or
die, we neglect nothing. All is polished and precise again next
morning; and whether people are happy or miserable, poor or
prosperous, still we sweep the stairs of a Saturday.
Now, I have insisted long on this English character, because
I want the reader to understand thoroughly the opposite ele-
ment of the noble picturesque; its expression, namely, of suffer-
ing, of poverty, or decay, nobly endured by unpretending strength
of heart. Nor only unpretending, but unconscious. If there be
visible pensiveness in the building, as in a ruined abbey, it be-
comes, or claims to become, beautiful; but the picturesqueness is
in the unconscious suffering,-the look that an old laborer has,
not knowing that there is anything pathetic in his gray hair and
withered arms and sunburnt breast: and thus there are the two
extremes, the consciousness of pathos in the confessed ruin,
which may or may not be beautiful, according to the kind of it;
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12543
and the entire denial of all human calamity and care, in the
swept proprieties and neatness of English modernism: and be-
tween these there is the unconscious confession of the facts of
distress and decay, in by-words; the world's hard work being gone
through all the while, and no pity asked for nor contempt feared.
And this is the expression of that Calais spire, and of all pict-
uresque things, in so far as they have mental or human expres-
sion at all.
THE FRIBOURG DISTRICT, SWITZERLAND
From Modern Painters >
I
Do not know that there is a district in the world more calcu-
lated to illustrate this power of the expectant imagination,
than that which surrounds the city of Fribourg in Switzer-
land, extending from it towards Berne. It is of gray sandstone,
considerably elevated, but presenting no object of striking inter-
est to the passing traveler; so that, as it is generally seen in the
course of a hasty journey from the Bernese Alps to those of
Savoy, it is rarely regarded with any other sensation than that
of weariness, all the more painful because accompanied with re-
action from the high excitement caused by the splendor of the
Bernese Oberland. The traveler, footsore, feverish, and satiated
with glacier and precipice, lies back in the corner of the diligence,
perceiving little more than that the road is winding and hilly,
and the country through which it passes cultivated and tame.
Let him, however, only do this tame country the justice of stay-
ing in it a few days until his mind has recovered its tone, and
take one or two long walks through its fields, and he will have
other thoughts of it. It is, as I said, an undulating district of
gray sandstone, never attaining any considerable height, but hav-
ing enough of the mountain spirit to throw itself into continual
succession of bold slope and dale; elevated also just far enough
above the sea to render the pine a frequent forest tree along its
irregular ridges. Through this elevated tract the river cuts its
way in a ravine some five or six hundred feet in depth, which
winds for leagues between the gentle hills, unthought of, until
its edge is approached: and then suddenly, through the boughs
of the firs, the eye perceives, beneath, the green and gliding
stream, and the broad walls of sandstone cliff that form its


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JOHN RUSKIN
banks; hollowed out where the river leans against them, at its
turns, into perilous overhanging; and on the other shore, at the
same spots, leaving little breadths of meadow between them and
the water, half overgrown with thicket, deserted in their sweet-
ness, inaccessible from above, and rarely visited by any curious.
wanderers along the hardly traceable foot-path which struggles
for existence beneath the rocks. And there the river ripples
and eddies and murmurs, in an utter solitude. It is passing
through the midst of a thickly peopled country; but never was a
stream so lonely. The feeblest and most far-away torrent among
the high hills has its companions: the goats browse beside it;
and the traveler drinks from it, and passes over it with his staff;
and the peasant traces a new channel for it down to his mill-
wheel. But this stream has no companions: it flows on in an
infinite seclusion, not secret nor threatening, but a quietness of
sweet daylight and open air,- a broad space of tender and deep
desolateness, drooped into repose out of the midst of human
labor and life; the waves plashing lowly, with none to hear
them; and the wild birds building in the boughs, with none to
fray them away; and the soft, fragrant herbs rising and breath-
ing and fading, with no hand to gather them; - and yet all
bright and bare to the clouds above, and to the fresh fall of the
passing sunshine and pure rain.
·
But above the brows of those scarped cliffs, all is in an in-
stant changed. A few steps only beyond the firs that stretch
their branches, angular and wild and white like forks of light-
ning, into the air of the ravine, and we are in an arable country
of the most perfect richness: the swathes of its corn glowing and
burning from field to field; its pretty hamlets all vivid with fruit-
ful orchards and flowery gardens, and goodly with steep-roofed
storehouse and barn; its well-kept, hard, park-like roads rising
and falling from hillside to hillside, or disappearing among brown
banks of moss and thickets of the wild raspberry and rose, or
gleaming through lines of tall trees, half glade, half avenue,
where the gate opens—or the gateless path turns trustedly aside,
unhindered, into the garden of some statelier house, surrounded
in rural pride with its golden hives, and carved granaries, and
irregular domain of latticed and espaliered cottages, gladdening
to look upon in their delicate homeliness-delicate, yet in some
sort rude: not like our English homes- trim, laborious, formal,
irreproachable in comfort; but with a peculiar carelessness and


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largeness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed love-
liness of their country. For there is an untamed strength even
in all that soft and habitable land. It is indeed gilded with
corn and fragrant with deep grass; but it is not subdued to the
plow or to the scythe. It gives at its own free will, it seems
to have nothing wrested from it nor conquered in it. It is not
redeemed from desertness, but unrestrained in fruitfulness, a
generous land, bright with capricious plenty, and laughing from
vale to vale in fitful fullness, kind and wild; nor this without
some sterner element mingled in the heart of it. For along all
its ridge stand the dark masses of innumerable pines, taking
no part in its gladness,-asserting themselves for ever as fixed
shadows, not to be pierced or banished even in the intensest
sunlight; fallen flakes and fragments of the night, stayed in their
solemn squares in the midst of all the rosy bendings of the orchard
boughs and yellow effulgence of the harvest, and tracing them-
selves in black network and motionless fringes against the
blanched blue of the horizon in its saintly clearness.
And yet
they do not sadden the landscape, but seem to have been set
there chiefly to show how bright everything else is round them;
and all the clouds look of purer silver, and all the air seems
filled with a whiter and more living sunshine, where they are
pierced by the sable points of the pines; and all the pastures
look of more glowing green, where they run up between the
purple trunks: and the sweet field footpaths skirt the edges of
the forest for the sake of its shade, sloping up and down about
the slippery roots, and losing themselves every now and then
hopelessly among the violets, and ground ivy, and brown shed-
dings of the fibrous leaves; and at last plunging into some
open aisle where the light through the distant stems shows that
there is a chance of coming out again on the other side; and
coming out indeed in a little while, from the scented darkness.
into the dazzling air and marvelous landscape, that stretches still
farther and farther in new willfulness of grove and garden, until
at last the craggy mountains of the Simmenthal rise out of it,
sharp into the rolling of the southern clouds.
I believe, for general development of human intelligence and
sensibility, country of this kind is about the most perfect that
exists. A richer landscape, as that of Italy, enervates or causes
wantonness; a poorer contracts the conceptions, and hardens the
temperament of both mind and body; and one more curiously or
XXI-785
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JOHN. RUSKIN
prominently beautiful deadens the sense of beauty. Even what
is here of attractiveness- far exceeding, as it does, that of most
of the thickly peopled districts of the temperate zone seems to
act harmfully on the poetical character of the Swiss; but take its
inhabitants all in all,-as with deep love and stern penetration
they are painted in the works of their principal writer, Gotthelf,
- and I believe we shall not easily find a peasantry which would
completely sustain comparison with them.
--
THE MOUNTAIN GLOOM
From Modern Painters >
-
I
Do not know any district possessing more pure or uninter-
rupted fullness of mountain character (and that of the high-
est order), or which appears to have been less disturbed
by foreign agencies, than that which borders the course of the
Trient between Valorsine and Martigny. The paths which lead
to it out of the valley of the Rhone, rising at first in steep
circles among the walnut-trees, like winding stairs among the
pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over the shoulders of the hills
into a valley almost unknown, but thickly inhabited by an indus-
trious and patient population. Along the ridges of the rocks,
smoothed by old glaciers into long, dark, billowy swellings, like
the backs of plunging dolphins, the peasant watches the slow
coloring of the tufts of moss and roots of herb, which little by
little gather a feeble soil over the iron substance; then, support-
ing the narrow strip of clinging ground with a few stones, he
subdues it to the spade; and in a year or two a little crest
of corn is seen waving upon the rocky casque. The irregular
meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among these har-
vested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets that seem always
to have chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of
the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and that
as the wind takes them, with all the grace but with none of the
formalism of fountains; dividing into fanciful change of dash
and spring, yet with the seal of their granite channels upon
them, as the lightest play of human speech may bear the seal of
past toil, and closing back out of their spray to lave the rigid
angles, and brighten with silver fringes and glassy films each


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12547
lower and lower step of stable stone; until at last, gathered all
together again, except perhaps some chance drops caught on
the apple blossom, where it has budded a little nearer the cascade
than it did last spring,-they find their way down to the turf,
and lose themselves in that silently; with quiet depth of clear
water furrowing among the grass blades, and looking only like.
their shadow, but presently emerging again in little startled
gushes and laughing hurries, as if they had remembered sud-
denly that the day was too short for them to get down the hill.
Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing streamlet, all
slope together in the sunshine towards the brows of the ravines,
where the pines take up their own dominion of saddened shade;
and with everlasting roar in the twilight, the stronger torrents
thunder down pale from the glaciers, filling all their chasms
with enchanted cold, beating themselves to pieces against the
great rocks that they have themselves cast down, and forcing
fierce way beneath their ghastly poise.
The mountain paths stoop to these glens in forky zigzags,
leading to some gray and narrow arch, all fringed under its
shuddering curve with the ferns that fear the light; a cross of
rough-hewn pine, iron-bound to its parapet, standing dark against
the lurid fury of the foam. Far up the glen, as we pause beside
the cross, the sky is seen through the openings in the pines,
thin with excess of light; and, in its clear, consuming flame of
white space, the summits of the rocky mountains are gathered
into solemn crown and circlets, all flushed in that strange, faint
silence of possession by the sunshine which has in it so deep a
melancholy; full of power, yet as frail as shadows; lifeless, like
the walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in tender fall of crim-
son folds, like the veil of some sea spirit that lives and dies as
the foam flashes; fixed on a perpetual throne, stern against all
strength, lifted above all sorrow, and yet effaced and melted
utterly into the air by that last sunbeam that has crossed to
them from between the two golden clouds.
High above all sorrow: yes; but not unwitnessing to it. The
traveler on his happy journey, as his foot springs from the deep
turf and strikes the pebbles gayly over the edge of the mountain
road, sees with a glance of delight the clusters of nut-brown.
cottages that nestle among those sloping orchards, and glow be-
neath the boughs of the pines. Here, it may well seem to him,
if there be sometimes hardship, there must be at least innocence
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JOHN RUSKIN
and peace, and fellowship of the human soul with nature. It
is not so. The wild goats that leap along those rocks have as
much passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men
that toil among them. Perhaps more. Enter the street of one
of those villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy
foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul.
Here it is torpor: not absolute suffering, not starvation or dis-
ease, but darkness of calm enduring; - the spring known only
as the time of the scythe, and the autumn as the time of the
sickle; and the sun only as a warmth, the wind as a chill, and
the mountains as a danger. They do not understand so much as
the name of beauty, or of knowledge. They understand dimly
that of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality, faith, these things
they know. To glean their meadows side by side, so happier;
to bear the burden up the breathless mountain flank, unmur-
muringly; to bid the stranger drink from their vessel of milk;
to see at the foot of their low death-beds a pale figure upon a
cross, dying also, patiently; in this they are different from the
cattle and from the stones, but in all this unrewarded as far
as concerns the present life. For them, there is neither hope
nor passion of spirit; for them neither advance nor exultation.
Black bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious day, weary arm at
sunset; and life ebbs away. No books, no thoughts, no attain-
ments; no rest except only sometimes a little sitting in the
sun under the church wall, as the bell tolls thin and far in the
mountain air; a pattering of a few prayers, not understood, by
the altar rails of the dimly gilded chapel, and so back to the
sombre home, with the cloud upon them still unbroken - that
cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the wild torrents and ruin-
ous stones, and unlightened even in their religion except by the
vague promise of some better thing unknown, mingled with
threatening, and obscured by an unspeakable horror-a smoke
as it were of martyrdom, coiling up with the incense, and amidst
the images of tortured bodies and lamenting spirits in hurtling
flames, the very cross, for them, dashed more deeply than for
others with gouts of blood.
Do not let this be thought a darkened picture of the life of
these mountaineers. It is literal fact. No contrast can be more
painful than that between the dwelling of any well-conducted
English cottager and that of the equally honest Savoyard. The
one, set in the midst of its dull flat fields and uninteresting
-
-


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JOHN RUSKIN
12549
hedge-rows, shows in itself the love of brightness and beauty; its
daisy-studded garden beds, its smoothly swept brick path to the
threshold, its freshly sanded floor and orderly shelves of house-
hold furniture, all testify to energy of heart, and happiness in the
simple course and simple possessions of daily life. The other
cottage, in the midst of an inconceivable, inexpressible beauty,
set on some sloping bank of golden sward, with clear fountains.
flowing beside it, and wild flowers and noble trees and goodly
rocks gathered round into a perfection as of Paradise, is itself a
dark and plague-like stain in the midst of the gentle landscape.
Within a certain distance of its threshold the ground is foul and
cattle-trampled; its timbers are black with smoke, its garden
choked with weeds and nameless refuse, its chambers empty and
joyless, the light and wind gleaming and filtering through the
crannies of their stones. All testifies that to its inhabitant the
world is labor and vanity; that for him neither flowers bloom,
nor birds sing, nor fountains glisten; and that his soul hardly
differs from the gray cloud that coils and dies upon his hills,
except in having no fold of it touched by the sunbeams.
DESCRIPTION OF NATURE
"T
From Modern Painters'
NO DRESS it and to keep it. "
That, then, was to be our work. Alas! what work have
we set ourselves upon instead! How have we ravaged the
garden instead of kept it,-feeding our war-horses with its flow-
ers, and splintering its trees into spear shafts!
"And at the East a flaming sword. "
Is its flame quenchless? and are those gates that keep the way
indeed passable no more? or is it not rather that we no more
desire to enter? For what can we conceive of that first Eden
which we might not yet win back, if we chose? It was a place
full of flowers, we say. Well: the flowers are always striving to
grow wherever we suffer them; and the fairer, the closer. There
may indeed have been a Fall of Flowers, as a Fall of Man: but
assuredly creatures such as we are can now fancy nothing lovelier
than roses and lilies; which would grow for us side by side, leaf
overlapping leaf, till the earth was white and red with them, if


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12550
JOHN RUSKIN
we cared to have it so. And Paradise was full of pleasant shades
and fruitful avenues. Well: what hinders us from covering as
much of the world as we like with pleasant shade and pure blos-
som, and goodly fruit? Who forbids its valleys to be covered
over with corn, till they laugh and sing? Who prevents its
dark forests, ghostly and uninhabitable, from being changed into
infinite orchards, wreathing the hills with frail-floretted snow,
far away to the half-lighted horizon of April, and flushing the
face of all the autumnal earth with glow of clustered food? But
Paradise was a place of peace, we say, and all the animals were
gentle servants to us. Well: the world would yet be a place of
peace if we were all peacemakers, and gentle service should we
have of its creatures if we gave them gentle mastery. But so
long as we make sport of slaying bird and beast, so long as we
choose to contend rather with our fellows than with our faults,
and make battle-field of our meadows instead of pasture,—so
long, truly, the Flaming Sword will still turn every way, and the
gates of Eden remain barred close enough, till we have sheathed
the sharper flame of our own passions, and broken down the
closer gates of our own hearts.
I have been led to see and feel this more and more, as I
considered the service which the flowers and trees, which man
was at first appointed to keep, were intended to render to him
in return for his care; and the services they still render to him,
as far as he allows their influence, or fulfills his own task towards
them. For what infinite wonderfulness there is in this vegeta-
tion, considered, as indeed it is, as the means by which the earth
becomes the companion of man- his friend and his teacher! In
the conditions which we have traced in its rocks, there could
only be seen preparation for his existence; - the characters which
enable him to live on it safely, and to work with it easily-in
all these it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation is to
it as an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The
earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except
of slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human be-
ings look upon and deal with, it ministers to them through a veil
of strange intermediate being; which breathes, but has no voice;
moves, but cannot leave its appointed place; passes through life
without consciousness, to death without bitterness; wears the
beauty of youth, without its passion; and declines to the weak-
ness of age, without its regret.


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And in this mystery of intermediate being, entirely subordi-
nate to us, with which we can deal as we choose, having just
the greater power as we have the less responsibility for our
treatment of the unsuffering creature, most of the pleasures which
we need from the external world are gathered, and most of the
lessons we need are written, all kinds of precious grace and
teaching being united in this link between the Earth and Man:
wonderful in universal adaptation to his need, desire, and disci-
pline; God's daily preparation of the earth for him, with beauti-
ful means of life. First a carpet to make it soft for him; then,
a colored fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of
foliage to shade him from sun heat, and shade also the fallen
rain, that it may not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay
to nourish the springs among the moss. Stout wood to bear this
leafage; easily to be cut, yet tough and light, to make houses for
him, or instruments (lance shaft, or plow handle, according to his
temper): useless it had been, if harder; useless, if less fibrous;
useless, if less elastic. Winter comes, and the shade of leafage
falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the strong boughs
remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds which
are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are
made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal
to the fancy of man or provision for his service: cold juice or
glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin,
medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm: and all these
presented in forms of endless change. Fragility or force, softness
and strength, in all degrees and aspects; unerring uprightness as
of temple pillars, or undivided wandering of feeble tendrils on
the ground; mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to the
storms of ages, or wavings to and from with faintest pulse of
summer streamlet. Roots cleaving the strength of rock, or bind-
ing the transience of the sand; crests basking in sunshine of the
desert, or hiding by dripping spring and lightless cave; foliage
far tossing in entangled fields beneath every wave of ocean-
clothing with variegated, everlasting films the peaks of the track-
less mountains, or ministering at cottage doors to every gentlest
passion and simplest joy of humanity.
Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful,
and good for food and for building and for instruments of our
hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and
--


## p. 12552 (#612) ##########################################

12552
JOHN RUSKIN
admiration from us, become, in proportion to their obtaining it,
a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and
way of life: so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves
the trees enough; and every one is assuredly wrong in both who
does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way.
is clearly possible to do without them, for the great companion-
ship of the sea and sky are all that sailors need; and many a
noble heart has been taught the best it had to learn between
dark stone walls. Still, if human life be cast among trees at all,
the love borne to them is a sure test of its purity. And it is a
sorrowful proof of the mistaken ways of the world that
"country," in the simple sense of a place of fields and trees, has
hitherto been the source of reproach to its inhabitants; and that
the words "countryman," "rustic," "clown," "paysan," "villager,"
still signify a rude and untaught person, as opposed to the words
townsman" and "citizen. " We accept this usage of words, or
the evil which it signifies, somewhat too quietly; as if it were
quite necessary and natural that country people should be rude,
and townspeople gentle. Whereas I believe that the result of
each mode of life may, in some stages of the world's progress,
be the exact reverse; and that another use of words may be
forced upon us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may find
ourselves saying: "Such-and-such a person is very gentle and
kind, he is quite rustic; and such-and-such another person is
very rude and ill-taught, he is quite urbane. "
«
At all events, cities have hitherto gained the better part of
their good report through our evil ways of going on in the world
generally;-chiefly and eminently through our bad habit of fight-
ing with each other. No field, in the middle ages, being safe
from devastation, and every country lane yielding easier passage
to the marauders, peacefully minded men necessarily congregated
in cities, and walled themselves in, making as few cross-country
roads as possible; while the men who sowed and reaped the
harvests of Europe were only the servants or slaves of the
barons. The disdain of all agricultural pursuits by the nobility,
and of all plain facts by the monks, kept educated Europe in
a state of mind over which natural phenomena could have no
power; body and intellect being lost in the practice of war
without purpose, and the meditation of words without meaning.
Men learned the dexterity with sword and syllogism, which they


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JOHN RUSKIN
12553
mistook for education, within cloister and tilt-yard; and looked
on all the broad space of the world of God mainly as a place
for exercise of horses, or for growth of food.
There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the perfectness
of the Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that
picture of Paul Uccello's of the battle of Sant' Egidio, in which
the armies meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild
roses; the tender red flowers tossing above the helmets and glow-
ing between the lowered lances. For in like manner the whole
of Nature only shone hitherto for man between the tossing of
helmet crests: and sometimes I cannot but think of the trees of
the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in that imperfect life
of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in the warm
springtime, in vain for men; and all along the dells of Eng-
land her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw
drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; and by the
sweet French rivers their long ranks of poplar waved in the
twilight, only to show the flames of burning cities, on the hori
zon, through the tracery of their stems; amidst the fair defiles
of the Apennines, the twisted olive trunks hid the ambushes of
treachery; and on their valley meadows, day by day, the lilies
which were white at the dawn were washed with crimson at sun-
set.
Of the many marked adaptations of nature to the mind of
man, it seems one of the most singular, that trees intended
especially for the adornment of the wildest mountains should be
in broad outline the most formal of trees. The vine, which is
to be the companion of man, is waywardly docile in its growth,
falling into festoons beside his cornfields, or roofing his garden.
walks, or casting its shadow all summer upon his door. Asso-
ciated always with the trimness of cultivation, it introduces all
possible elements of sweet wildness. The pine, placed nearly
always among scenes disordered and desolate, brings into them
all possible elements of order and precision. Lowland trees may
lean to this side and that, though it is but a meadow breeze that
bends them, or a bank of cowslips from which their trunks lean
aslope. But let storm and avalanche do their worst, and let the
pine find only a ledge of vertical precipice to cling to, it will
nevertheless grow straight. Thrust a rod from its last shoot
down the stem; it shall point to the centre of the earth as
long as the tree lives.


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JOHN RUSKIN
Also it may be well for lowland branches to reach hither and
thither for what they need, and to take all kinds of irregular
shape and extension. But the pine is trained to need nothing
and to endure everything. It is resolvedly whole, self-contained,
desiring nothing but rightness, content with restricted comple-
tion. Tall or short, it will be straight. Small or large, it will
be round. It may be permitted also to these soft lowland trees
that they should make themselves gay with show of blossom, and
glad with pretty charities of fruitfulness. We builders with the
sword have harder work to do for man, and must do it in close-
set troops. To stay the sliding of the mountain snows, which
would bury him; to hold in divided drops at our sword points
the rain, which would sweep away him and his treasure fields;
to nurse in shade among our brown fallen leaves the tricklings
that feed the brooks in drought; to give massive shield against
the winter wind, which shrieks through the bare branches of the
plain; such service must we do him steadfastly while we live.
Our bodies also are at his service: softer than the bodies of
other trees, though our toil is harder than theirs. Let him take
them as pleases him, for his houses and ships. So also it may
be well for these timid lowland trees to tremble with all their
leaves, or turn their paleness to the sky, if but a rush of rain
passes by them; or to let fall their leaves at last, sick and sere.
But we pines must live carelessly amidst the wrath of clouds.
We only wave our branches to and fro when the storm pleads
with us, as men toss their arms in a dream.
-
And finally, these weak lowland trees may struggle fondly for
the last remnants of life, and send up feeble saplings again from
their roots when they are cut down. But we builders with the
sword perish boldly; our dying shall be perfect and solemn, as
our warring; we give up our lives without reluctance, and for
ever.
I wish the reader to fix his attention for a moment on these
two great characters of the pine,-its straightness and rounded
perfectness; both wonderful, and in their issue lovely, though
they have hitherto prevented the tree from being drawn. I say
first, its straightness. Because we constantly see it in the wildest
scenery, we are apt to remember only as characteristic examples
of it those which have been disturbed by violent accident or
disease. Of course such instances are frequent. The soil of the
pine is subject to continual change; perhaps the rock in which


## p. 12555 (#615) ##########################################

JOHN RUSKIN
12555
.
it is rooted splits in frost and falls forward, throwing the young
stems aslope; or the whole mass of earth around it is undermined
by rain; or a huge bowlder falls on its stem from above, and
forces it for twenty years to grow with weight of a couple of
tons leaning on its side. Hence, especially at edges of loose
cliffs, about waterfalls, or at glacier banks, and in other places
liable to disturbance, the pine may be seen distorted and oblique;
and in Turner's 'Source of the Arveron,' he has, with his usual
unerring perception of the main point in any matter, fastened
on this means of relating the glacier's history. The glacier can-
not explain its own motion, and ordinary observers saw in it
only its rigidity; but Turner saw that the wonderful thing was
its non-rigidity. Other ice is fixed, only this ice stirs. All the
banks are staggering beneath its waves, crumbling and withered
as by the blast of a perpetual storm. He made the rocks of his
foreground loose-rolling and tottering down together; the pines,
smitten aside by them, their tops dead, bared by the ice wind.
But the pine was
Nevertheless, this is not the truest or universal expression
of the pine's character. I said long ago, even of Turner:
« Into
the spirit of the pine he cannot enter. " He understood the gla-
cier at once: he had seen the force of sea on shore too often to
miss the action of those crystal-crested waves.
strange to him, adverse to his delight in broad and flowing
line; he refused its magnificent erectness. Magnificent! — nay,
sometimes, almost terrible. Other trees, tufting crag or hill, yield
to the form and sway of the ground; clothe it with soft compli-
ance; are partly its subjects, partly its flatterers, partly its com-
forters. But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained;
nor can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff,
far from all house or work of men, looking up to its compa-
nies of pine, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous
ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the
shadow of the one beside it-upright, fixed, spectral as troops of
ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other-
dumb for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to them:
those trees never heard human voice; they are far above all
sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs.
All comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of the Va-
cancy and the Rock: yet with such iron will that the rock itself
looks bent and shattered beside them,-fragile, weak, inconsistent,


## p. 12556 (#616) ##########################################

12556
JOHN RUSKIN
compared to their dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of
enchanted pride; - unnumbered, unconquerable.
Then note, farther, their perfectness. The impression on most
people's minds must have been received more from pictures than
reality, so far as I can judge, so ragged they think the pine;
whereas its chief character in health is green and full round-
ness. It stands compact, like one of its own cones, slightly
curved on its sides, finished and quaint as a carved tree in some
Elizabethan garden; and instead of being wild in expression,
forms the softest of all forest scenery: for other trees show their
trunks and twisting boughs; but the pine, growing either in
luxuriant mass or in happy isolation, allows no branch to be
seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down
to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there
is nothing but green cone and green carpet. Nor is it only
softer, but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage; for it
casts only a pyramidal shadow. Lowland forest arches overhead,
and checkers the ground with darkness; but the pine, growing in
scattered groups, leaves the glades between emerald-bright. Its
gloom is all its own; narrowing into the sky, it lets the sunshine.
strike down to the dew. And if ever a superstitious feeling
comes over me among the pine glades, it is never tainted with
the old German forest fear, but is only a more solemn tone of
the fairy enchantment that haunts our English meadows; so that
I have always called the prettiest pine gláde in Chamouni,
"Fairies' Hollow. " It is in the glen beneath the steep ascent
above Pont Pelissier, and may be reached by a little winding
path which goes down from the top of the hill; being indeed
not truly a glen, but a broad ledge of moss and turf, leaning
in a formidable precipice (which however the gentle branches
hide) over the Arve. An almost isolated rock promontory, many-
colored, rises at the end of it. On the other sides it is bordered
by cliffs, from which a little cascade falls, literally down among
the pines; for it is so light, shaking itself into mere showers of
seed pearl in the sun, that the pines don't know it from mist,
and grow through it without minding. Underneath, there is
only the mossy silence; and above, for ever, the snow of the
nameless Aiguille.
And then the third character which I want you to notice in
the pine is its exquisite fineness. Other trees rise against the


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JOHN RUSKIN
12557
sky in dots and knots, but this in fringes. * You never see the
edges of it, so subtle are they; and for this reason, it alone of
trees, so far as I know, is capable of the fiery change which
we saw before had been noticed by Shakespeare. When the sun
rises behind a ridge crested with pine,-provided the ridge be
at a distance of about two miles, and seen clear,
all the trees,
for about three or four degrees on each side of the sun, become
trees of light, seen in clear flame against the darker sky, and
dazzling as the sun itself. I thought at first this was owing to
the actual lustre of the leaves; but I believe now it is caused
by the cloud dew upon them,-every minutest leaf carrying its
diamond. It seems as if these trees, living always among the
clouds, had caught part of their glory from them; and, them-
selves the darkest of vegetation, could yet add splendor to the
sun itself.
-
Yet I have been more struck by their character of finished
delicacy at a distance from the central Alps, among the pastoral
hills of the Emmenthal or lowland districts of Berne; where
they are set in groups between the cottages, whose shingle roofs
* Keats (as is his way) puts nearly all that may be said of the pine into
one verse, though they are only figurative pines of which he is speaking. I
have come to that pass of admiration for him now, that I dare not read him,
so discontented he makes me with my own work; but others must not leave
unread, in considering the influence of trees upon the human soul, that mar-
velous ode to Psyche. Here is the piece about pines:-
"Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees
Fledge the wild-ridgèd mountains, steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the Gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win;
A bright torch, and a casement ope, at night,
To let the warm Love in. »


## p. 12558 (#618) ##########################################

12558
JOHN RUSKIN
(they also of pine) of deep gray blue, and lightly carved fronts,
golden and orange in the autumn sunshine, gleam on the banks
and lawns of hillside,- endless lawns, mounded and studded and
bossed all over with deeper green hay heaps, orderly set, like
jewelry (the mountain hay, when the pastures are full of springs,
being strangely dark and fresh in verdure for a whole day after
it is cut). And amidst this delicate delight of cottage and field,
the young pines stand delicatest of all, scented as with frankin-
cense, their slender stems straight as arrows, and crystal white,
looking as if they would break with a touch, like needles; and
their arabesques of dark leaf pierced through and through by
the pale radiance of clear sky, opal blue, where they follow each
other along the soft hill ridges, up and down.
I have watched them in such scenes with the deeper inter-
est, because of all trees they have hitherto had most influence on
human character. The effect of other vegetation, however great,
has been divided by mingled species: elm and oak in England,
poplar in France, birch in Scotland, olive in Italy and Spain,
share their power with inferior trees, and with all the changing
charm of successive agriculture. But the tremendous unity of
the pine absorbs and molds the life of a race. The pine shad-
ows rest upon a nation. The Northern peoples, century after
century, lived under one or other of the two great powers of the
Pine and the Sea, both infinite. They dwelt amidst the forests,
as they wandered on the waves, and saw no end, nor any other
horizon; - still the dark-green trees, or the dark-green waters,
jagged the dawn with their fringe or their foam. And whatever
elements of imagination, or of warrior strength, or of domes-
tic justice, were brought down by the Norwegian and the Goth
against the dissoluteness or degradation of the South of Europe,
were taught them under the green roofs and wild penetralia of
the pine.
LEAVES MOTIONLESS
From Modern Painters >
•
LEAV
EAVES motionless. The strong pines wave above them, and
the weak grasses tremble beside them: but the blue stars
rest upon the earth with a peace as of heaven; and far
along the ridges of iron rock, moveless as they, the rubied crests
of Alpine rose flush in the low rays of morning. Nor these yet


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JOHN RUSKIN
12559
the stillest leaves. Others there are subdued to a deeper quiet-
ness, the mute slaves of the earth, to whom we owe perhaps
thanks and tenderness the most profound of all we have to
render for the leaf ministries.
It is strange to think of the gradually diminished power and
withdrawn freedom among the orders of leaves,- from the sweep
of the chestnut and gadding of the vine, down to the close
shrinking trefoil and contented daisy, pressed on earth; and at
last to the leaves that are not merely close to earth, but them-
selves a part of it,- fastened down to it by their sides, here
and there only a wrinkled edge rising from the granite crystals.
We have found beauty in the tree yielding fruit, and in the
herb yielding seed. How of the herb yielding no seed,* the fruit-
less, flowerless lichen of the rock?
Lichen, and mosses (though these last in their luxuriance are
deep and rich as herbage, yet both for the most part humblest
of the green things that live),- how of these? Meek creatures!
the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its
dintless rocks; creatures full of pity, covering with strange and
tender honor the scarred disgrace of ruin,-laying quiet finger
on the trembling stones, to teach them rest. No words, that I
know of, will say what these mosses are. None are delicate
enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one
to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green,
the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the Rock
Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass, the traceries of
intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, bur-
nished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy
traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and
framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace. They will not
be gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet or love token; but of
these the wild bird will make its nest, and the wearied child his
pillow.
-
And as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us.
When all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the soft
mosses and gray lichen take up their watch by the headstone.
The woods, the blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done
their parts for a time; but these do service for ever. Trees for
* The reader must remember always that my work is concerning the
aspects of things only. Of course a lichen has seeds, just as other plants
have; but not effectually or visibly, for man.


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12560
JOHN RUSKIN
the builder's yard, flowers for the bride's chamber, corn for the
granary, moss for the grave.
Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the
most honored of the earth-children. Unfading as motionless, the
worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in
lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To
them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is intrusted the weaving of
the dark eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-penciled,
iris-dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing
the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endur-
ance and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white
hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the
parched meadow the drooping of its cowslip gold,-far above,
among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest starlike on the
stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder
western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.
CLOUD-BALANCINGS
From Modern Painters'
W®
E HAVE seen that when the earth had to be prepared for
the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate
being was spread between him and its darkness, in which
were joined, in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility
of the earth and the passion and perishing of mankind.
But the heavens also had to be prepared for his habitation.
Between their burning light-their deep vacuity—and man,
as between the earth's gloom of iron substance and man, a veil
had to be spread of intermediate being;- which should appease
the unendurable glory to the level of human feebleness, and sign
the changeless motion of the heavens with a semblance of human
vicissitude.
Between earth and man arose the leaf. Between the heaven
and man came the cloud. His life being partly as the falling
leaf, and partly as the flying vapor.
Has the reader any distinct idea of what clouds are ?
We
had some talk about them long ago, and perhaps thought their
nature, though at that time not clear to us, would be easily
enough understandable when we put ourselves seriously to make
it out. Shall we begin with one or two easiest questions?


## p. 12561 (#621) ##########################################

JOHN RUSKIN
12561
That mist which lies in the morning so softly in the valley,
level and white, through which the tops of the trees rise as if
through an inundation,—why is it so heavy? and why does it lie
so low, being yet so thin and frail that it will melt away utterly
into splendor of morning, when the sun has shone on it but a
few moments more? Those colossal pyramids, huge and firm,
with outlines as of rocks, and strength to bear the beating of the
high sun full on their fiery flanks,-why are they so light, their
bases high over our heads, high over the heads of Alps? why
will these melt away, not as the sun rises, but as he descends,
and leave the stars of twilight clear, while the valley vapor gains.
again upon the earth like a shroud?
Or that ghost of a cloud, which steals by yonder clump of
pines; nay, which does not steal by them, but haunts them,
wreathing yet round them, and yet-and yet, slowly; now falling
in a fair waved line like a woman's veil; now fading, now gone:
we look away for an instant, and look back, and it is again
there. What has it to do with that clump of pines, that it
broods by them and weaves itself among their branches, to and
fro? Has it hidden a cloudy treasure among the moss at their
roots, which it watches thus? Or has some strong enchanter
charmed it into fond returning, or bound it fast within those.
bars of bough? And yonder filmy crescent, bent like an archer's
bow above the snowy summit, the highest of all the hill,- that
white arch which never forms but over the supreme crest,- how
is it stayed there, repelled apparently from the snow; nowhere
touching it, the clear sky seen between it and the mountain edge,
yet never leaving it, poised as a white bird hovers over its
nest?
Or those war-clouds that gather on the horizon, dragon-crested,
tongued with fire;-how is their barbed strength bridled? what
bits are these they are champing with their vaporous lips, fling-
ing off flakes of black foam? Leagued leviathans of the Sea of
Heaven, out of their nostrils goeth smoke, and their eyes are
like the eyelids of the morning. The sword of him that layeth
at them cannot hold the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.
Where ride the captains of their armies? Where are set the
measures of their march? Fierce murmurers, answering each
other from morning until evening,- what rebuke is this which
has awed them into peace? what hand has reined them back by
the way by which they came?
XXI-786


## p. 12562 (#622) ##########################################

12562
JOHN RUSKIN
How is a cloud outlined? Granted whatever you choose to
ask, concerning its material or its aspect, its loftiness and lumi-
nousness,-how of its limitation? What hews it into a heap, or
spins it into a web? Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose; extend-
ing over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You
cannot have, in the open air, angles and wedges and coils and
cliffs of cold. Yet the vapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep as
a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of
a brazen bar; or braids itself in and out, and across and across,
like a tissue of tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into
waving shreds and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels
is the vapor pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter's
clay? By what hands is the incense of the sea built up into
domes of marble?


## p. 12563 (#623) ##########################################

12563
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
(1844-)
ILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL, a disciple of George Cupples the un-
rivaled, is the story-teller of the sea: not so picturesque as
Cooper, not so broadly humorous as Marryat, not so imagi-
native as Stevenson; but now that they have ceased spinning yarns,
its story-teller par excellence.
W
The ocean is his stage, the ship his drawing-room or tennis court,
the launch his bicycle; his heroes the brave sailors who stand for
pluck, endurance, promptitude, courage. Through a dozen or more
tales the sea lashes in a most beautiful
manner, the sails creak, the salt breeze
blows. Black night, blazing noon, starlight
and moonlight are shifted over it; terrible
tempests come and go. The author of the
'Wreck of the Grosvenor,' most thrilling
and absorbing exposé of the sailor's life of
peril and privation in the service of the
British ship-owner, writes stories strangely
compounded of romance and reality; curi-
ously realistic in the delineation of charac-
ter, wildly improbable in plot and situation.
When he sits down to spin his yarn, all
things are possible to him, and to us. Early
in the action we give the ship over to him,
and do not attempt to account for motive or situation; but swal-
low the whole impossible, perfectly credible story, as we swallowed
'Red Rover' in its time.

W. CLARK RUSSELL
Perhaps, with all the freedom of the broad seas, the story is told by
a young girl, who mentions in the opening chapter that this is her
first voyage; or perhaps the strange methods of ocean life, the evo-
lutions of a ship, and its seizure by convicts in a storm, are related
in nautical phraseology by another young woman who now first
smells salt water.
Perhaps the hero and heroine are picked up in an open boat
which also holds her venerable father, presumably a thousand miles
distant; - but we do not demur. The art of life, the "ernst ist das
leben" kind, is a trifling matter to him and to us. His men and
women, on the contrary, barring the nautical wisdom of his hero-
ines, make no demands on credulity. They are drawn with unadorned


## p. 12564 (#624) ##########################################

12564
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
plainness; they have matter-of-fact affections, and straightforward
views of duty. The reader's first sensation, when he has finished one
of Mr. Clark Russell's stories, is the amused perception that he has
been in the hands of an entirely independent genius, who has sat
down before bare walls, with a sheet of paper in front of him, and
told his tale, undisturbed by the hobgoblin Consistency or the scourge
of tradition, who would perhaps have written as he writes, if nobody
had ever written a novel before or since.
His material-shipwrecks, storms, fires at sea-is not novel to us;
but it is new to him, and he revels in it with all the joy of discov-
ery. We may look for nothing modern in the treatment or style; no
note of mental alertness, of swift moral process or subtle inference.
It is all plain sailing in the world of motive and character. The
sea is the deus ex machina: it battles with the privateers, frees the
prisoners on the convict ship, bears the emigrant vessel sailed by its
woman crew safely into port. With its calm loveliness the author
contrasts the blood-stained decks of a vessel after a sea fight; the
darkness of the hold where the brave heroine hides, a stowaway, is
heightened by the sunrise on the ocean, its broad breast bathed in
rainbow hues.
.
The sea is his stage of impossible actions, where his characters
perform their courageous, self-forgetful deeds.
William Clark Russell was born in New York city, of English
parents, February 24th, 1844; the son of Henry Russell the composer,
author of the popular songs 'Cheer, Boys, Cheer,' and 'A Good Time's
Coming. ' He went to school in France and at Winchester; and enter-
ing the merchant service at thirteen and a half years of age, made
voyages to Japan, India, and Australia.
After he came of age he left the sea, and was on the staff of the
Newcastle Chronicle, and afterwards of the London Daily Telegraph.
His first positive success in literature, 'The Wreck of the Grosvenor,'
was published anonymously in London in 1878: but his second book,
'A Sea Queen,' betrayed his identity, and since that time he has
gone the way of the popular author; at his best perhaps in his first
book, in the 'Sea Queen,' Jack's Courtship,' 'An Ocean Free Lance,'
'A Sailor's Sweetheart,' and 'The Good Ship Mohonk. '
There is a fine ignoring of self in Mr. Clark Russell's novels; and
all his romances are healthy food for healthy appetites. His is a
Homeric conception of sea life: his picture of the British seaman
noble, generous, confiding in unprofessional matters, imperious, cruel,
unscrupulous to the enemy-has the value of a portrait. To appre-
ciate the splendid word-painting, the subtle delicate touches, one has
only to turn the pages of any one of his stories. Rarely has the sea
had a truer lover, a more faithful interpreter.
-


## p. 12565 (#625) ##########################################

WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12565
A STORM AND A RESCUE
From the Wreck of the Grosvenor
LL that night it blew terribly hard, and raised as wild and
raging a sea as ever I remember hearing or seeing de-
scribed. During my watch-that is, from midnight until
four o'clock — the wind veered a couple of points, but had gone
back again only to blow harder; just as though it had stepped
out of its way a trifle to catch extra breath.
I was quite worn out by the time my turn came to go below;
and though the vessel was groaning like a live creature in its
death agonies, and the seas thumping against her with such
shocks as kept me thinking that she was striking hard ground,
I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, and never
moved until routed out by Duckling four hours afterward.
All this time the gale had not bated a jot of its violence, and
the ship labored so heavily that I had the utmost difficulty in
getting out of the cuddy on to the poop. When I say that the
decks fore and aft were streaming wet, I convey no notion of
the truth: the main deck was simply afloat, and every time the
ship rolled, the water on her deck rushed in a wave against
the bulwarks and shot high in the air, to mingle sometimes with
fresh and heavy inroads of the sea, both falling back upon the
deck with the boom of a gun.
I had already ascertained from Duckling that the well had
been sounded and the ship found dry; and therefore, since we
were tight below, it mattered little what water was shipped above,
as the hatches were securely battened down fore and aft, and the
mast-coats unwrung.
But still she labored under the serious dis-
advantage of being overloaded; and the result was, her fore parts
were being incessantly swept by seas which at times completely
hid her forecastle in spray.
Shortly after breakfast, Captain Coxon sent me forward to dis-
patch a couple of hands on to the jib-boom to snug the inner jib,
which looked to be rather shakily stowed. I managed to dodge
the water on the main-deck by waiting until it rolled to the star-
board scuppers, and then cutting ahead as fast as I could; but
just as I got upon the forecastle, I was saluted by a green sea
which carried me off my legs, and would have swept me down
on the main-deck had I not held on stoutly with both hands
to one of the fore-shrouds. The water nearly drowned me, and


## p. 12566 (#626) ##########################################

12566
WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
kept me sneezing and coughing for ten minutes afterward. But
it did me no further mischief; for I was incased in good oilskins
and sou'-wester, which kept me as dry as a bone inside.
Two ordinary seamen got upon the jib-boom, and I bade them
keep a good hold, for the ship sometimes danced her figure-head
under water and buried her spritsail-yard; and when she sunk
her stern, her flying jib-boom stood up like the mizzenmast. I
waited until this job of snugging the sail was finished, and then
made haste to get off the forecastle, where the seas flew so con-
tinuously and heavily that had I not kept a sharp lookout, I
should several times have been knocked overboard.
Partly out of curiosity and partly with a wish to hearten the
men, I looked into the forecastle before going aft. There were
sliding-doors let into the entrance on either side the windlass,
but one of them was kept half open to admit air, the forescuttle
above being closed. The darkness here was made visible by an
oil lamp,-in shape resembling a tin coffee-pot with a wick in
the spout, which burned black and smokily. The deck was
up to my ankles in water, which gurgled over the pile of swabs
that lay at the open entrance. It took my eye some moments to
distinguish objects in the gloom; and then by degrees the strange
interior was revealed. A number of hammocks were swung
against the upper deck; and around the forecastle were two rows
of bunks, one atop the other. Here and there were sea-chests
lashed to the deck; and these, with the huge windlass, a range of
chain cable, lengths of rope, odds and ends of pots and dishes,
with here a pair of breeches hanging from a hammock, and there
a row of oilskins swinging from a beam,-pretty well made up
all the furniture that met my eye.
-
The whole of the crew were below. Some of the men lay
smoking in their bunks, others in their hammocks with their
boots over the edge; one was patching a coat, another greasing
his boots; others were seated in a group talking; while under the
lamp were a couple of men playing at cards upon a chest, three
or four watching and holding on by the hammocks over their
heads.
A man, lying in his bunk with his face toward me, started up
and sent his legs, incased in blanket trousers and brown woolen
stockings, flying out.
"Here's Mr. Royle, mates! " he called out. "Let's ask him
the name of the port the captain means to touch at for proper
food, for we aren't goin' to wait much longer. ”


## p. 12567 (#627) ##########################################

WILLIAM CLARK RUSSELL
12567
"Don't ask me any questions of that kind, my lads," I re-
plied promptly, seeing a general movement of heads in the
bunks and hammocks. "I'd give you proper victuals if I had
the ordering of them; and I have spoken to Captain Coxon about
you, and I am sure he will see this matter put to rights. "
I had difficulty in making my voice heard, for the striking of
the seas against the ship's bows filled the place with an over-
whelming volume of sound; and the hollow, deafening thunder
was increased by the uproar of the ship's straining timbers.
"Who the devil thinks," said a voice from a hammock, "that
we're going to let ourselves be grinded as we was last night
without proper wittles to support us? I'd rather have signed
articles for a coal-barge, with drowned rats to eat from Gravesend
to Whitstable, than shipped in this here cursed wessel, where the
bread's just fit to make savages retch! "
I had not bargained for this, but had merely meant to address
them cheerily, with a few words of approval of the smart way
in which they had worked the ship in the night. Seeing that
my presence would do no good, I turned about and left the fore-
castle, hearing, as I came away, one of the Dutchmen cry out:-
"Look here, Mister Rile, vill you be pleashed to ssay when
we are to hov' something to eat? - for by Gott! ve vill kill te
dom pigs in the long-boat if the skipper don't mindt-so look
out!
As ill-luck would have it, Captain Coxon was at the break of
the poop, and saw me come out of the forecastle. He waited
until he had got me alongside of him, when he asked me what I
was doing among the men.
"I looked in to give them a good word for the work they did
last night," I answered.
"And who asked you to give them a good word, as you call
it ?