INTRODUCTION xxiii

this green and orange, united by purple, as they are at the time when the sun has left the pines and stays on the granite. The great fall was bounding as it did, now with wilder crashes, I thought, as the wind brought its roar to me across the fields-the sweet level fields-all the tenderness of the forest lowland, with the calm and freshness of the mountain, not the hillocky wilderness of Zermatt, nor the ruined desolation of Courmayeur, but all full of peace and joy and power. I was almost in tears as I watched the light declining behind the grand pines’ sweep and rugged crest of the noble Breven once more.

It is unnecessary in this introduction to follow him upon this tour, for he has himself elsewhere described it in some detail.¹ Such supplementary particulars as diaries and letters supply are given, not here, but in the introduction to vols. iii. and iv. of Modern Painters, because they refer to studies and impressions which made their mark in that work. It was now once more the turn of geology and the varying aspects of field and sky to take first place in his attention. On this tour also he spent several days in the galleries of the Louvre, and wrote elaborate notes on many of the pictures there (printed in a later volume of this edition). His general reading was diligently continued. The diaries and notebooks show, besides his constant study (close and minute) of the Bible, that he was deep in Dante and Aristophanes during this tour; he was also reading Carlyle with particular attention, and among other books which impressed him was the Nouvelle Héloise of Rousseau; it “has given me,” he says, “as much pleasure as surprise considering the way it is abused, but I must read more ere I judge.”² Perhaps it was the reading of Rousseau that suggested to him an essay which he began to write at Chamouni (July 1, 1849), but did not carry very far, on “Principles of Virtue.” At Courmayeur (July 29) he began another on a different subject-“The Uses of Ignorance.” It had occurred to him, he notes, owing to “the diminution which my knowledge of the Alps had made in my sublime impressions of them, and by the way in which the investigation of strata and structure reduces all mountain sublimity to mere debris and wall-building.”³ The wall-building of the Matterhorn supplied him, however, with materials for some effective pages in this volume (ch. v.); and though his principal interests on this summer tour of 1849 were mountains, clouds and pictures, he did not omit the

¹ Præterita, ii. ch. xi. See also Fors Clavigera, Letter 90.

² Further study did not altogether alter his view of Rousseau’s influence: see Lectures on Architecture and Painting, §§ 92, 93, and compare, at a later date and in a different connection, Catalogue of the Educational Series, No. 59. See also Præterita, i. ch. vi. § 134; ii. ch. v. §§ 84, 210; Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 73.

³ Compare the letter to Mr. C. E. Norton, cited below, p. xxvii.

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