IV. JOANNA’S CARE 549

their eternal sea, over sands which the sunset gilded with its withdrawing glow, from the measureless distances of the west, on the ocean horizon, or veiled in silvery mists, or shadowed with fast-flying storm, of which nevertheless every cloud was pure, and the winter snows blanched in the starlight. For myself, the impressions of the Solway sands are a part of the greatest teaching that ever I received during the joy of youth:-for Turner, they became the most pathetic that formed his character in the prime of life, and the five Liber Studiorum subjects, “Solway Moss,” “Peat Bog, Scotland,” “The Falls of Clyde,” “Ben Arthur,” and “Dunblane Abbey,”¹ remain more complete expressions of his intellect, and more noble monuments of his art, than all his mightiest after work, until the days of sunset in the west came for it also.

75. As Redgauntlet is, in its easily readable form,² inaccessible, nowadays, I quote at once the two passages which prove Scott’s knowledge of music, and the strong impression made on him by the scenery between Dumfries and Annan. Hear, first, of Darsie Latimer’s escape from the simplicity of his Quaker friends to the open downs of the coast which had formerly seemed so waste and dreary:-

“The air I breathed felt purer and more bracing. The clouds, riding high upon a summer breeze, drove, in gay succession, over my head, now obscuring the sun, now letting its rays stream in transient flashes upon various parts of the landscape, and especially upon the broad mirror of the distant Firth of Solway.”³

A moment afterwards he catches the tune of “Old Sir Thom a Lyne,” sung by three musicians “cosily niched into what you might call a bunker,* a little sandpit, dry and

* This is a modern word, meaning, first, a large chest; then, a recess scooped in soft rock.⁴

¹ [For Ruskin’s numerous references to these plates, see the General Index.]

² [That is, in the original edition in three volumes, with large print.]

³ [This and the following quotations are from Letter x.]

⁴ [This is Ruskin’s note, and it is curious that he misses Scott’s use of the word from the language of golf. “Furze” is “whins” in Scott.]

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