298 PRÆTERITA-II

green bastions and bright Salève and rushing Rhone and far Jura, all so lovely that I was nearly vowing never to go into Italy again.”

(II.) “June 6th.-Pouring rain all day, and slow extempore sermon from a weak-voiced young man in a white arched small chapel, with a braying organ and doggerel hymns. Several times, about the same hour on Sunday mornings, a fit of self-reproach has come upon me for my idling at present, and I have formed resolutions to be always trying to get knowledge of some kind or other, or bodily strength, or some real available, continuing good, rather than the mere amusement of the time. It came on me to-day very strongly, and I would give anything and everything to keep myself in the temper, for I always slip out of it next day.”

(III.) “Dec. 11th, 1842.-Very odd! Exactly the same fit came on me in the same church, next year, and was the origin of Turner’s work.”¹

¹ [For a note on this entry, see below, p. 316. Among the MS. is a sheet, headed “Addenda,” which may be inserted here:-

“I was then twenty-one (born Feb. 8th, 1819), and it is worth while noting that a year or two afterwards, chancing to call with Dr. Acland on John Varley, the conversation falling on his favourite science of astrology, and we both laughing at it, he challenged either of us to give him the place and hour of our nativity, saying that, if either could, he could prove the truth of the science in ten minutes to him. I happened to be able to give mine, and in certainly not more than ten minutes, occupied in drawing the diagram of its sky, he fastened upon the three years of my past life when I was fourteen, eighteen, and twenty-one, as having been especially fatal to me.

“These were the years in which I first saw at Paris, secondly in London, staying with us in our Herne Hill house, and thirdly, lost by her marriage, the French girl to whom certain very foolish love-poems were written, which my least wise friends plague me now to reprint. But the three periods of crisis were only foci in the general mistake, mismanagement, and misfortune of all my education, mind and heart, precisely between those years from the age of fourteen to twenty-one, out of which, however, I have gained knowledge of the nature and results of various misconduct and absurdity, which are now a valuable property of their sort. The girl being once fairly married, and-which was of more importance-I beginning to feel a little how foolish and wicked I had been, I took myself up in returning from Italy over the Cenis in 1841, and finding breath and spirit suddenly stronger in a scorching morning at Lans-le-bourg, I date from that hour and place the beginning of my vital work and education.”

For the morning at Lans-le-bourg, June 2, 1841, see above, p. 296; and for another reference to Varley, p. 81 n.]

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