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hideous rocks of whitish hard stone, heaped one on another in mountainous heights, that I think the like is nowhere to be found more horrid and solitary. On the summit of one of these gloomy precipices, intermingled with trees and shrubs, the stones hanging over and menacing ruin, is built an hermitage.”¹

I believe this passage to be accurately characteristic of the pure English mind about rocks. If they are only big enough to look as if they would break your head if they fell on it, it is all an Englishman asks, or can understand, of them. The modern thirst for self-glorification in getting to the top of them² is indeed often accompanied with good interest in geographical and other science; and nice boys and girls do enjoy their climbing, and lunching in fields of primula. But I never trace a word in one of their journals of sorrow for the destruction of any Swiss scene or Swiss character, so only that they have their own champagne at lunch.

77. The “hideous rocks” of Fontainebleau were, I grieve to say, never hideous enough to please me. They always seemed to me no bigger than I could pack and send home for specimens, had they been worth carriage; and in my savage dislike of palaces and straight gravel walks, I never found out the spring which was the soul of the place. And to-day, I missed rocks, palace, and fountain all alike, and found myself lying on the bank of a cart-road in the sand, with no prospect whatever but that small aspen tree against the blue sky.

Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced,-without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they “composed” themselves, by finer laws than any known of men. At last, the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere.

¹ [Compare A Lecture on Landscape, § 24: Vol. XXXIII. p. 535.]

² [For references to passages on Alpine climbing, see Vol. XVI. p. 138 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]