APPENDIX 641

become intelligible to him, not only in their talk over their own affairs, but in advice and warning to himself, in auguries which never erred, and which every child could learn to understand.

Nor do I hesitate to say that to all persons who look faithfully for guidance to the aspects and powers of Nature, distinct help and grave warning will be given by the voice of birds, which could be received in no other way....

Then for the Singing Tree: the voice of melody is given to it as being a part of Humanity, put expressly in our charge, planted and tended and grafted and guided, as animals, even domestic ones, cannot be; and in its medicinal balms and fruit, an essential part of spiritual life (think what the olive, orange, and rose-those three alone-have been to mankind); with the pine for his ships and the oak for his building. I write these lines (1st Sept., 1888) at my old home of Champagnole, where but the day before yesterday I had a walk in the pine wood, and on rocks glowing with deep purple cyclamen above the glen of the Ain, which might well have been in the Earthly Paradise after Christ’s Kingdom shall be come. And in the actual sound of forests, and the murmur or whisper of the spring winds through budding branches and setting blossoms, there is a true Eolian song, addressed partly to the ear, but more to the heart and to the true and creative imagination. The fable of Apollo and Daphne, chief of those founded on the humanity of trees, and the resultant acceptance of the laurel crown as the purest reward of moral and intellectual power used nobly in the service of man, has yet a deeper symbolism in its expression of the true love which may be felt, if we are taught by the Muses, for the beautiful earth-bound creatures that cherish and survive our own fleeting lives.

[The proof breaks off without any interpretation of the Golden Water. As this intended chapter of Dilecta was to have been parallel with vol. iii. ch. i. of Præterita (“The Grande Chartreuse”), Ruskin would, no doubt, have moralized the story by reference to sacred wells, such as that of the Chartreuse (above, p. 482).]

For chapter iv. (“Brave Galloway”) Ruskin had collected some little information about his Scottish ancestry: see now, above, pp. 602-604.

Chapter vii. (“The Jungfrau,” or alternatively “The Laws of the Son of Sirach”¹) was to have contained “final note on my girl acquaintances and poetry.” In a MS. beginning, the chapter is headed “He heard music and dancing.”² On another beginning, in printed proof, the motto is “The March of the Scarlet Lancers”; then follow the verses by Ruskin called “The Peace Song” in his Poems (see Vol. II. p. 245); and the chapter begins thus:-

These lines were written to be sung by those who could sing, to the dancing of those who could dance, chosen among the girls who had feeling and sound practice in such mysteries, at the school of

¹ [The reference being to the Book of Ecclesiasticus (e. g., xxxii. 2, 5, 6) written by “Jesus, the Son of Sirach.”]

² [Luke xv. 25.]

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