APPENDIX 609

Only by much attention-if any one cares to give it,-nor then without some clue of personal word, like this I am writing,-could the spectator of me at all imagine what an obstinate little black powder of adamant the faltering sparks glowed through the grain of.

[The MS. then continues as in the text of i. § 246 (p. 220), and thereafter continues:-]

And in this place, therefore, I will sum once for all the places, and mark the times, as far as I remember, which thus formed my instincts and sense of nativity for ever. First-Market Street, Croydon, and its lovely rough wooden pump with rude stones round it, and tiled cottage roofs. Thence all my steady love of cottages, lattices, littlenesses, roughnesses, humilities-to this day-so that I am never at ease in a fine house, nor happy among anything proud or polished.

Then, in a more solemn way, the Tay, Erne, and Wandel, as early familiar rivers-Loch Leven and Queen’s Ferry, Derwent Water and Coniston Water, till I was ten years old-and later, with some scientific interest meddling in the business, Matlock and Bristol. Add the open sea beach at Sandgate, and the general type of ruined abbey from Tintern to Furness, and of round-towered English castle, and I have pretty nearly numbered what are properly native elements to me. I may rejoice in other things intensely, but always as exotic.

On this stem of obstinate nature, then, rooted in wild rock, there had been scarcely any pruning done, still less training-and what watering and salt of learning, most curiously mixed and thin. The oddest point to me now, looking back, is that while every other day in travelling I saw some new city-gate, vale-abbey, or historic castle, nobody ever thought of teaching me, nor I of picking up, a single crumb of human history. I knew the stories of marathon and Salamis-had heard of Alexander the Great, and tried to imagine Hannibal passing the Alps. Of English history I knew that Richard III. had smothered his nephew, and that Charles I. had lost his head and Charles II. hid in an oak,-that much out of history books, and what I picked up out of Shakespeare and Scott, formed the total fund of knowledge possessed by me in illustration of either castle or abbey, of which one was just as good to me as another-I being entirely content with the indisputable conviction that knights and monks had lived in them some time or other. The want of imagination was, I suppose, the fatal obstacle to me; but also my extreme enjoyment of the thing as it was, and general notion that the world was in its perfection now, and that the comfortable inn, well-kept cathedral, and ornamental ruins all over ivy, were originally contemplated by Providence in allowing the Fall of man, prevented me from giving myself the trouble of thinking what might have happened in the Dark Ages.

XXXV. 2 Q

[Version 0.04: March 2008]