304 PRÆTERITA-II

a little girl;¹ and being a fairly good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with a little true Alpine feeling of my own, has been rightly pleasing to nice children, and good for them. But it is totally valueless, for all that. I can no more write a story than compose a picture.²

65. Jephson kept his word, and let me go in six weeks, with my health, he told me,-I doubt not, truly,-in my own hands. And indeed, if I had continued to live on mutton and iron, learned to swim in the sea which I loved, and set myself wholly upon my geology and poissons-vivants instead of fossiles,-Well, I suppose I should have been drowned like Charles,³ or lain, within a year or two,

“on a glacier, half way up to heaven,

Taking my final rest.”⁴

What might have been, the mute Fates know. I myself know only, with certainty, what ought not to have been,-that, getting released from Leamington, I took again to brown potatoes and cherry-pie; instead of learning to swim and climb, continued writing pathetic verses,⁵ and at this particularly foolish crisis of life, as aforesaid, trying to paint twilight like Turner. I was not simpleton enough to think I could follow him in daylight, but I thought I could do something like his Kenilworth Castle at sunset,⁶ with the milkmaid and the moon.

66. I have passed without notice what the reader might suppose a principal event of my life,-the being introduced

¹ [See Vol. I. p. xlviii.]

² [Compare above, p. 120.]

³ [See above, p. 137.]

⁴ [Roger’s Italy (“Jorasse”):-

“Within a little month

He lay among those awful solitudes,

(’Twas on a glacier-half-way up to Heaven)

Taking his final rest.”]

⁵ [The later parts, for instance, of the “Broken Chain,” Vol. II. pp. 311 seq.]

⁶ [For mentions of this drawing by Turner, see Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. pp. 266 n., 423). Ruskin’s imitation was the “Castle of Amboise.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]