418 PRÆTERITA-II

Sunset, then, seen from the pier-head across those whispering fringes; belfry chime at evening and morning; and the new life of that year, 1846, was begun.¹

188. After our usual rest at Champagnole, we went on over the Cenis to Turin, Verona, and Venice;² whereat I began showing my father all my new discoveries in architecture and painting. But there began now to assert itself a difference between us I had not calculated on. For the first time I verily perceived that my father was older than I, and not immediately nor easily to be put out of his way of thinking in anything. We had been entirely of one mind about the carved porches of Abbeville, and living pictures of Vandyck; but when my father now found himself required to admire also flat walls, striped like the striped calico of an American flag, and oval-eyed saints

¹ [Here in the MS. is a passage beginning:-

“Some readers may perhaps care to see the actual diary entry at Champagnole this year on which the beginning of the sixth chapter of Seven Lamps was afterwards founded:-

‘April 19th.-It has been one of the singular and threatening days when the sky is mottled with the sharp-edged silver-grey cloud that Fielding uses above his rain. It seems to me to precede rain, not accompany it;-the sky looks like a grey canvas loaded with scattered stones and supported by pegs, the sharp dark edge of every wave being downmost, and very continuous,-no spray nor jaggedness except at intervals where a rugged fragment hung down like a waterspout, sometimes continued into a fringe, an effect I have rarely seen without rain, of which not a drop fell. Wind westerly, with nothing in it, I suppose.

‘I have been walking in the woods beside the river on the ascent towards St. Laurent ... [for the rest of the passage, see Vol. VIII. p. 221 n.] ... I think if that pine forest had been among the Alleghanies, or if the stream had been Niagara, I should only have looked at them with intense melancholy and desire for home.’

‘Home,’ of course, meaning here either Duppas Hill and the Wandel, or Friar’s Crag and Derwentwater. But again I am disposed to be pleased with myself in the contentment with familiar, instead of curiosity for strange things, and in the tacit assumption that the cascades of Ain were better than any quantity of Niagaras. Concerning which I may note here in memory of Osborne Gordon, the classic form in which he used to put the answer, now confusedly hackneyed, given by the impressionable American to his poetic friend, eager for his admiration of ‘the irresistible flood thundering into the unfathomable abyss.’ Many manners of reply have been since invented, but Gordon’s quiet one seems yet to me the best-‘What is there to hinder it?’”]

² [For the itinerary of the tour of 1846, with extracts from Ruskin’s diary, see Vol. VIII. pp. xx.-xxiii.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]