CH. II THE LAMP OF TRUTH 99

once from houses of prayer¹-those grey arches and quiet aisles under which the sheep of our valleys feed and rest on the turf that has buried their altars-those shapeless heaps, that are not of the Earth, which lift our fields into strange and sudden banks of flowers, and stay our mountain streams with stones that are not their own, have other thoughts to ask from us than those of mourning for the rage that despoiled, or the fear that forsook them. It was not the robber, not the fanatic, not the blasphemer, who sealed the destruction that they had wrought; the war, the wrath, the terror, might have worked their worst, and the strong walls would have risen, and the slight pillars would have started again, from under the hand of the destroyer. But they could not rise out of the ruins of their own violated truth.

¹ [Ruskin’s feeling for the ruined abbeys of England, which is expressed in this passage, was heightened, no doubt, by Turner’s drawings of so many of them. Thus, the description of the “rent skeletons of pierced wall,” etc., would well fit either Lindisfarne (Holy Island) or Whitby-both of them Turner subjects (see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xviii. § 6, where Turner’s pilgrimage is described “to the lonely arches of Whitby and the bleak sands of Holy Isle”; and for Lindisfarne, see Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. xi. § 29). “The Scoto-Irish monks who were at this time (seventh century) the great missionaries of Northumbria brought with them from Iona a preference for the solitary coast and its islands. ‘High Whitby’s cloistered pile’ thus became the first point seen by the seaman in returning to his native shores, and the last he would miss in leaving them; and the lights streaming from its windows must often have served him as a ‘Pharos.’” The bay was known as “Sinus Phari,” from its lighthouse or beacon (see Murray’s Yorkshire, 1874, p. 214). The expression “Pharos light” is used again by Ruskin below in a MS. passage; see p. 256 n., and cf. Sesame and Lilies, § 68. The following description-of “those grey arches and quiet aisles,” etc.-fits any of the Cistercian abbeys of which remains have survived-such as Fountains, Furness, Tintern, Byland, or Kirkstall (before Leeds blackened it); for it was a rule of the order to choose inland valleys and “deserts” (see Monasticon Cistercience, ed. 1892, p. 213). Here, again, many of these were Turner subjects; see, e.g., in Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. ix. § 17, the description of the drawing of Kirkstall, “where the cattle lie in unhindered rest.” The final passage-“those shapeless heaps,” etc.-fits many monastic sites, Cistercian, Benedictine, Cluniac or Augustinian. Perhaps Ruskin was thinking more especially of Rievaulx, on the Rye-once more a Turner subject (see Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. xi. § 29).]

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