5TACK 
 
 ANNEX 
 N 
 
 1875B
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN
 
 FRONDES AGRESTES 
 
 READINGS IN MODERN PAINTERS.'
 
 Printed by Watson and Hazell, London and Ayleebury.
 
 FRONDES 'AGRESTES. 
 
 READINGS IN 'MODERN PAINTERS,' 
 
 CHOSEN AT HER PLEASURE, 
 BY THE AUTHOR'S FRIEND, 
 
 THE YOUNGER LADY OF THE THWAITE, 
 CONISTON. 
 
 "Spargit agrestes tibi ilva froudes. " 
 
 GEORGE ALLEN, 
 
 SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT. 
 1875.
 
 Stack 
 Annex 
 
 PKEFACE. 
 
 I HAVE been often asked to republish the 
 first book of mine which the public noticed, 
 and which, hitherto, remains their favourite, 
 in a more easily attainable form than that 
 of its existing editions. I am, however, 
 resolved never to republish the book as a 
 whole ; some parts of it being, by the estab- 
 lished fame of Turner, rendered unnecessary: 
 and others having been always useless, in their 
 praise of excellence which the public will 
 never give the labour necessary to discern. 
 But, finding lately that one of my dearest 
 friends, who, in advanced age, retains the cheer- 
 fulness and easily delighted temper of bright 
 youth, had written out, for her own pleasure,
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 a large number of passages from ' Modern 
 Painters,' it seemed to me certain that what 
 such a person felt to be useful to herself, 
 could not but be useful also to a class of 
 readers whom I much desired to please, and 
 who would sometimes enjoy, in my early 
 writings, what I never should myself have 
 offered them. I asked my friend, therefore, 
 to add to her own already chosen series, 
 any other passages she thought likely to be 
 of permanent interest to general readers; and 
 I have printed her selections in absolute sub- 
 mission to her judgment, merely arranging 
 the pieces she sent me in the order which 
 seemed most convenient for the reciprocal 
 bearing of their fragmentary meanings, and 
 adding here and there an explanatory note ; 
 or, it may be, a deprecatory one, in cases 
 where my mind had changed. That she did 
 me the grace to write every word with her 
 own hand, adds, in my eyes, and will, I trust, 
 in the readers' also, to the possible claims of
 
 PREFACE. vii 
 
 the little book on their sympathy; and although 
 I hope to publish some of the scientific and 
 technical portions of the original volumes in 
 in my own large editions, the selections here 
 made by my friend under her quiet woods 
 at Coniston the Unter-Walden of England 
 will, I doubt not, bring within better reach of 
 many readers, for whom I am not now able 
 myself to judge or choose, such service as 
 the book was ever capable of rendering, in 
 the illustration of the powers of nature, and 
 intercession for her now too often despised 
 and broken peace. 
 
 HERNE HILL, 
 
 5th December, 1874.
 
 FRONDES AGRESTES, 
 
 SECTION I. 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF ART. 
 
 1. PERFECT taste is the faculty of receiving 
 the greatest possible pleasure from those ma- 
 terial sources which are attractive to our moral 
 nature in its purity and perfection ; but why 
 we receive pleasure from some forms and 
 colours and not from others, is no more to be 
 asked or answered than why we like sugar 
 and dislike wormwood. 
 
 2. The temper by which right taste is formed 
 is characteristically patient. It dwells upon 
 what is submitted to it. It does not trample 
 upon it, lest it should be pearls, even though it 
 look like husks. It is good ground, penetrable, 
 
 1
 
 2 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 retentive ; it does not send up thorns of unkind 
 thoughts, to choke the weak seed ; it is hungry 
 and thirsty too, and drinks all the dew that 
 falls on it. It is an honest and good heart, 
 that shows no too ready springing before the 
 sun be up, but fails not afterwards ; it is 
 distrustful of itself, so as to be ready to believe 
 and to try all things, and yet so trustful of 
 itself, that it will neither quit what it has 
 tried, nor take anything without trying. And 
 the pleasure which it has in things that it 
 finds true and good, is so great, that it can- 
 not possibly be led aside by any tricks of 
 fashion, or diseases of vanity ; it cannot be 
 cramped in its conclusions by partialities and 
 hypocrisies ; its visions and its delights are 
 too penetrating, too living, for any white- 
 washed object or shallow fountain long to 
 endure or supply. It clasps all that it loves 
 so hard that it crushes it if it be hollow. 
 
 3. It is the common consent of men that 
 whatever branch of'a'ny pursuit ministers to 
 the bodily comforts, and regards material uses, 
 is ignoble, and whatever part is addressed to
 
 PRINCIPLES OF ART. 3 
 
 the miud only, is noble ; and that geology 
 does better in reclothing dry bones and re- 
 vealing lost creations, than in tracing veins 
 of lead and beds of iron ; astronomy better 
 in opening to us the houses of heaven, than 
 in teaching navigation ; botany better in dis- 
 playing structure than in expressing juices ; 
 surgery better in investigating organization 
 than in setting limbs. Only it is ordained 
 that, for our encouragement, every step we 
 make in the more exalted range of science 
 adds something also to its practical applica- 
 bilities ; that all the great phenomena of 
 nature, the knowledge of which is desired by 
 the angels only, by us partly, as it reveals to 
 farther vision the being and the glory of Him 
 in whom they rejoice and we live, dispense yet 
 such kind influences and so much of material 
 blessing as to be joyfully felt by all inferior 
 creatures, and to be desired by them witli 
 such single desire as the imperfection of their 
 nature may admit ; that the strong torrents, 
 which, in their own gladness, fill the hills with 
 hollow thunder, and the vales with winding- 
 light, have yet their bounden charge of field to
 
 4 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 feed, and barge to bear ; that the fierce flames 
 
 7 o 
 
 to which the Alp owes its upheaval and the 
 volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein, 
 and warm the quickening spring ; and that for 
 our incitement, I say, not our reward, for 
 knowledge is its own reward, herbs have 
 their healing, stones their preciousness, and 
 stars their times. 
 
 4. Had it been ordained by the Almighty* 
 that the highest pleasures of sight should be 
 those of most difficult attainment, and that 
 to arrive at them it should be necessary to 
 accumulate gilded palaces, tower over tower, 
 and pile artificial mountains around insinuated 
 lakes, there would never have been a direct 
 contradiction between the unselfish duties and 
 the inherent desires of every individual. But 
 no such contradiction exists in the system of 
 
 * The reader must observe, that having been tho- 
 roughly disciplined in the Evangelical schools, I sup- 
 posed myself, at four-and-twenty, to know all about 
 the ordinances of the Almighty. Nevertheless, the 
 practical contents of the sentence are good ; if only 
 they are intelligible, which I doubt.
 
 PRINCIPLES OF ART. 5 
 
 Divine Providence ; which, leaving it open 
 to us if we will, as creatures in probation, 
 to abuse this sense like every other, and 
 pamper it with selfish and thoughtless vani- 
 ties, as we pamper the palate with deadly 
 meats, until the appetite of tasteful cruelty 
 is lost in its sickened satiety, incapable of 
 pleasure unless, Caligula like, it concentrates 
 the labour of a million of lives into the sensa- 
 tion of an hour, leaves it also open to us, by 
 humble and loving ways, to make ourselves 
 susceptible of deep delight, which shall not 
 separate us from our fellows, nor require the 
 sacrifice of any duty or occupation, but which 
 shall bind us closer to men and to God, and be 
 with us always, harmonized with every action, 
 consistent with every claim, unchanging and 
 eternal. 
 
 5. A great Idealist never can be egotistic. 
 The whole of his power depends upon his losing 
 sight and feeling of his own existence, and be- 
 coming a mere witness and mirror of truth, and 
 a scribe of visions, always passive in sight, 
 passive in iitterance, lamenting continually that
 
 6 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 lie cannot completely reflect nor clearly utter 
 all he has seen, not by any means a proud state 
 for a man to be in. But the man who has no 
 invention is always setting things in order,* 
 and putting the world to rights, and mending, 
 and beautifying, and pluming himself on his 
 doings, as supreme in all ways. 
 
 G. So far as education does indeed tend to 
 make the senses delicate, and the perceptions 
 accurate, and thus enables people to be pleased 
 with quiet instead of gaudy colour, and with 
 graceful instead of coarse form ; and by long 
 acquaintance with the best things, to discern 
 quickly what is fine from what is common so 
 far acquired taste is an honourable faculty, and 
 it is true praise of anything to say, it is " in 
 good taste." But,f so far as this higher educa- 
 
 * I am now a comic illustration of this sentence, 
 myself. I have not a ray of invention in all my 
 brains ; but am intensely rational and orderly, and 
 have resolutely begun to set the world to rights. 
 
 t Nobody need begin this second volume sentence 
 unless they are breathed like the Graeme : 
 
 " Right up Ben Ledi could he press, 
 And not a sob his toil confess."
 
 PRINCIPLES OF ART. 7 
 
 tion lias a tendency to narrow the sympathies 
 and harden the heart, diminishing the interest 
 of all beautiful things by familiarity, until even 
 what is best can hardly please, and what is 
 brightest hardly entertain, so far as it fosters 
 pride, and leads men to found the pleasure they 
 take in anything, not on the worthiness of the 
 thing, but on the degree in which it indicates 
 some greatness of their own, (as people build 
 marble porticoes, and inlay marble floors, not so 
 much because they like the colours of marble, 
 or find it pleasant to the foot, as because such 
 porches and floors are costly, and separated in 
 all human eyes from plain entrances of stone 
 and timber) ; so far as it leads people to prefer 
 gracefulness of dress, manner, and aspect, to 
 value of substance and heart, liking a well said 
 thing better than a true thing, and a well 
 trained manner better than a sincere one, and 
 a delicately-formed face better than a good- 
 natured one, -and in all other ways and things 
 setting custom and semblance above everlasting 
 truth ; so far, finally, as it induces a sense of 
 inherent distinction between class and class, and 
 causes everything to be more or less despised
 
 8 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 which has no social rank, so that the affection, 
 pleasure, or grief of a clown are looked upon 
 as of no interest compared with the affection 
 and grief of a well-bred man ; just so far, in 
 all these several ways, the feeling induced by 
 what is called " a liberal education " is utterly 
 adverse to the understanding of noble art. 
 
 7. He who habituates himself in his daily 
 life to seek for the stern facts in whatever he 
 hears or sees, will have these facts again 
 brought before him by the involuntary ima- 
 ginative power, in their noblest associations ; 
 and he who seeks for frivolities and fallacies, 
 will have frivolities and fallacies again pre- 
 sented to him in his dreams.* 
 
 8. All the histories of the Bible are yet 
 waiting to be painted. Moses has never been 
 painted ; Elijah never ; David never (except 
 as a mere ruddy stripling) ; Deborah never ; 
 
 * Very good. Few people have any idea how much 
 more important the government of the mind is, than 
 the force of its exertion. Nearly all the world flog 
 their horses, without ever looking where they are 
 going.
 
 PR^CIPLES OF ART. 9 
 
 Gideon never ; Isaiah never.* What single 
 example does the reader remember of painting 
 which suggested so much as the faintest sha- 
 dow of their deeds? Strong men in armour, 
 or aged men with flowing beards, he may 
 remember, who, when he looked at his Louvre 
 or Uffizii catalogue, he found were intended 
 to stand for David, or Moses. But does he 
 suppose that, if these pictures had suggested 
 to him the feeblest image of the presence 
 of such men, he would have passed on as he 
 assuredly did, to the next picture, representing, 
 doubtless, Diana and Actason, or Cupid and the 
 Graces, or a gambling quarrel in a pothouse 
 with no sense of pain or surprise? Let him 
 meditate over the matter, and he will find ulti- 
 mately that what I say is true, and that religious 
 art at once complete and sincere never yet has 
 existed. 
 
 * I knew nothing, when I wrote this passage, of 
 Luini, Filippo Lippi, or Sandro Botticelli ; and had 
 not capacity to enter into the deeper feelings even 
 of the men whom I was chiefly studying, Tintoret 
 and Fra Angelico. But the British public is at present 
 as little acquainted with the greater Florentines as 
 I was then, and the passage, for them, remains true.
 
 10 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 SECTION II. 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 
 
 9. WHAT are the legitimate uses of the 
 imagination, that is to say, of the power of 
 perceiving, or conceiving with the mind, things 
 which cannot be perceived by the senses ? Its 
 first and noblest use is,* to enable us to bring 
 sensibly to our sight the things which are 
 recorded as belonging to our future state, or 
 invisibly surrounding us in this. It is given 
 us, that we may imagine the cloud of wit- 
 nesses, in heaven, and earth, and sea, as if they 
 were now present ; the souls of the righteous 
 waiting for us ; that we may conceive the 
 great army of the inhabitants of heaven, and 
 
 * I should be glad if the reader who is interested in 
 the question here raised, would read, as illustrative of 
 the subsequent statement, the account of Tintoret's 
 ' Paradise,' in the close of my Oxford lecture on 
 Michael Angelo and Tintoret, which I have printed 
 separately to make it generally accessible.
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 11 
 
 discover among them those whom we most 
 desire to be with for ever ; that we may be 
 able to vision forth the ministry of angels 
 beside us, and see the chariots of fire on the 
 mountains that gird us round ; but, above all, 
 to call up the scenes and facts in which we 
 are commanded to believe, and be present, as 
 if in the body, at every recorded event of the 
 history of the Redeemer. Its second and 
 ordinary use is, to empower us to traverse the 
 scenes of all other history, and force the facts 
 to become again visible, so as to make upon 
 us the same impression which they would have 
 made if we had witnessed them ; and, in the 
 minor necessities of life, to enable us, out of 
 any present good, to gather the utmost measure 
 of enjoyment, by investing it with happy as- 
 sociations, and, in any present evil, to lighten 
 it, by summoning back the images of other 
 hours ; and also to give to all mental truths 
 some visible type, in allegory, simile, or per- 
 sonification, which shall most deeply enforce 
 them ; and finally, w r hen the mind is utterly 
 out wearied, to refresh it with such innocent 
 play as shall be most in harmony with the
 
 12 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 suggestive voices of natural things, permitting 
 it to possess living companionship, instead of 
 silent beauty, and create for itself fairies in 
 the grass, and naiads in the wave. 
 
 10. Yet, because we thus reverence the 
 power and art of imagination, let none of us 
 despise the power and art of memory. 
 
 Let the reader consider seriously what he 
 would give at any moment to have the power 
 of arresting the fairest scenes, those which so 
 often rise before him only to vanish ; to stay 
 the cloud in its fading, the leaf in its trembling, 
 and the shadows in their changing ; to bid the 
 fitful foam be fixed upon the river, and the 
 ripples be everlasting upon the lake ; and then 
 to bear away with him no darkness or feeble 
 sun-stain, (though even that is beautiful,) but a 
 counterfeit which should seem no counterfeit 
 the true and perfect image of life indeed. Or 
 rather, (for the full majesty of such a power is 
 not thus sufficiently expressed,) let him consider 
 that it would be in effect nothing less than a 
 capacity of transporting himself at any moment 
 into any scene a gift as great as can be pos-
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 13 
 
 sessed by a disembodied spirit ; and suppose, 
 also, this necromancy embracing not only the 
 present but the past, and enabling us seem- 
 ingly to enter into the very bodily presence of 
 men long since gathered to the dust ; to behold 
 them in act as they lived ; but, with greater 
 privilege than ever was granted to the com- 
 panions of those transient acts of life, to see 
 them fastened at our will in the gesture and 
 expression of an instant, and stayed on the eve 
 of some great deed, in immortality of burning 
 purpose. Conceive, so far as is possible, such 
 power as this, and then say whether the art 
 which conferred it is to be spoken lightly of, or 
 whether we should not rather reverence, as half- 
 divine, a gift which would go so far as to raise 
 us into the rank, and invest us with the felici- 
 ties of angels.* 
 
 11. I believe the first test of a truly great man 
 is his humility. I do not mean by humility, 
 doubt of his own power, or hesitation of speaking 
 his opinions ; but a right understanding of the 
 
 * Passage written in opposition to the vulgar notion 
 that the 'mere imitation' of Nature is easy, and useless.
 
 14 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 relation between what he can do and say, and 
 the rest of the world's sayings and doings. All 
 great men not only know their business, but 
 usually know that they know it ; and are not 
 only right in their main opinions, but they 
 usually know that they are right in them ; 
 only they do not think much of themselves 011 
 that account. Arnolfo knows he can build a 
 good dome at Florence ; Albert Durer writes 
 calmly to one who has found fault with his 
 work, " It cannot be better done ;" Sir Isaac 
 Newton knows that he has worked out a pro- 
 blem or two that would have puzzled anybody 
 else ; only they do not expect their fellow-men, 
 therefore, to fall down and worship them. They 
 have a curious under-sense of powerlessness, 
 feeling that the greatness is not in them, but 
 through them ; that they could not do or be 
 anything else than God made them and they 
 see something divine and God-made in every 
 other man they meet, and are endlessly, fool- 
 ishly, incredibly merciful. 
 
 12. As far as I can observe, it is a constant 
 law, that the greatest men, whether poets or his-
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 15 
 
 torians, live entirely in their own age, and the 
 greatest fruits of their work are gathered out 
 of their own age. Da-nte paints Italy in the 
 thirteenth century ; Chaucer, England in the 
 fourteenth ; Masaccio, Florence in the fif- 
 teenth ; Tintoret, Venice in the sixteenth ; all 
 of them utterly regardless of anachronism and 
 minor error of every kind, but getting always 
 vital truth out of the vital present. If it be 
 said that Shakspeare wrote perfect historical 
 plays on subjects belonging to the preceding 
 centuries, I answer that they are perfect plays, 
 just because there is no care about centuries in 
 them, but a life which all men recognise for the 
 human life of all time and this it is, not because 
 Shakspeare sought to give universal truth, but 
 because painting, honestly and completely, from 
 the men about him, he painted that human 
 nature which is indeed constant enough, a 
 rogue in the fifteenth century being at heart 
 what a rogue is in the nineteenth, and was in 
 the twelfth ; and an honest or knightly man 
 being in like manner very similar to other 
 such at any other time. And the work of these 
 great idealists is, therefore, always universal ;
 
 16 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 not because it is not portrait, but because it is 
 complete portrait, down to the heart, which is 
 the same in all ages ; and the work of the mean 
 idealist is not universal, not because it is 
 portrait, but because it is half portrait of the 
 outside, the manners and the dress, not of the 
 heart. Thus Tintoret and Shakspeare paint, 
 both of them, simply Venetian and English 
 nature, as they saw it in their time, down to 
 the root ; and it does for all time ; but as for 
 any care to cast themselves into the particular 
 ways and tones of thought, or custom, of past 
 time in their historical work, you will find it 
 in neither of them,* nor in any other perfectly 
 great man that I know of. 
 
 13. I think it probable that many readers may 
 
 * What vestige of Egyptian character is there, for 
 instance, in Cleopatra ? of Athenian in Theseus or 
 Timon 1 of old English in Imogen or Cordelia ? 
 of old Scottish in Macbeth ? or even of mediaeval 
 Italian in Petruchio, the Merchant of Venice, or Des- 
 demona ? And the Roman plays appear definitely 
 Roman only because the strength of Rome was the 
 eternal strength of the world, pure family life, sus- 
 tained by agriculture, and defended by simple and 
 fearless manhood.
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 17 
 
 be surprised at my calling Scott the great re- 
 presentative of the mind of the age of literature. 
 Those who can perceive the intense penetrative 
 depth of Wordsworth, and the exquisite finish 
 and melodious power of Tennyson, may be 
 offended at my placing in higher rank that 
 poetry of careless glance and reckless rhyme in 
 which Scott poured out the fancies of his youth ; 
 and those who are familiar with the subtle ana- 
 lysis of the French novelists, or who have in 
 any wise submitted themselves to the influence 
 of German philosophy, may be equally indig- 
 nant at my ascribing a principality to Scott 
 among the literary men of Europe, in an age 
 which has produced De Balzac, and Goethe.* 
 
 But the mass of sentimental literature con- 
 cerned with the analysis and description of 
 emotion, headed by the poetry of Byron, is al- 
 together of lower rank than the literature which 
 
 * I knew nothing of Goethe when I put him with 
 Balzac ; but the intolerable dulness which encumbers 
 the depth of Wilhelm Meister, and the cruel reserve 
 which conceals from all but the intensest readers the 
 meaning of Faust, have made him, in a great degree, 
 an evil influence in European literature ; and Evil is 
 always second-rate. 
 
 2
 
 18 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 merely describes what it saw. The true seer 
 feels as intensely as any one else ; but he does 
 not much describe his feelings. He tells you 
 whom he met, and what they said ; leaves you to 
 make out, from that, what they feel, and what he 
 feels, but goes into little detail. And, generally 
 speaking, pathetic writing and careful expla- 
 nation of passion are quite easy, compared with 
 this plain recording of what people said, and did, 
 or with the right invention of what they are 
 likely to say and do ; for this reason, that to 
 invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly 
 tell any part of a story, it is necessary to 
 grasp the entire mind of every personage con- 
 cerned in it, and know precisely how they 
 would be affected by what happens ; which to 
 do, requires a colossal intellect ; but to describe 
 a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed 
 that one should feel it oneself ; and thousands 
 of people are capable of feeling this or that 
 noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into 
 all the feelings of somebody sitting on the other 
 side of the table. Even, therefore, where this 
 sentimental literature is first rate, as in passages 
 of Byron, Tennyson, and Keats, it ought not to
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 19 
 
 be ranked so high as the creative ; and though 
 perfection even in narrow fields is perhaps as 
 rare as in the wider, and it may be as long- 
 before we have another " In Memoriam" as 
 another " Guy Mannering," I unhesitatingly 
 receive as a greater manifestation of power, the 
 right invention of a few sentences spoken by 
 Pleydell and Mannering across their supper- 
 table, than the most tender and passionate 
 melodies of the self-examining verse. 
 
 14. Fancy plays like a squirrel in its circular 
 prison, and is happy ; but Imagination is a 
 pilgrim on the earth and her home is in 
 heaven. Shut her from the fields of the 
 celestial mountains, bear her from breathing 
 
 ' O 
 
 their lofty, sun-warmed air ; and we may as 
 well turn upon her the last bolt of the 
 Tower of Famine, and give the keys to the 
 keeping of the wildest surge that washes 
 Capraja and Gorgona.* 
 
 * I leave this passage, as my friend has chosen it ; 
 but it is unintelligible without the contexts, which 
 show how all the emotions described in the preceding 
 passages of this section, are founded on trust in the 
 beneficence and rule of an Omnipotent Spirit.
 
 20 FKONDES AGKESTES. 
 
 15. In the highest poetry, there is no word so 
 familiar, but a great man will bring good out 
 of it, or rather, it will bring good to him, and 
 answer some end for which no other word 
 would have done equally well. A common 
 person, for instance, would be mightily puzzled 
 to apply the word ' whelp ' to anyone, with a 
 view of flattering him. There is a certain 
 freshness and energy in the term, which gives 
 it agreeableness, but it seems difficult, at first 
 hearing it, to use it complimentarily. If the 
 person spoken of be a prince, the difficulty 
 seems increased ; and when farther he is at 
 one and the same moment to be called a 
 1 whelp ' and contemplated as a hero, it seems 
 that a common idealist might well be brought 
 to a pause ! But hear Shakspeare do it : 
 
 " Awake his warlike spirit, 
 
 And your great uncle's, Edward the Black Prince, 
 Who on the French ground played a tragedy, 
 Making defeat on the full power of France, 
 While his most mighty father on a hill 
 Stood smiling, to behold his lion's whelp 
 Forage in blood of French nobility." 
 
 16. Although in all lovely nature there is, first
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 21 
 
 an excellent degree of simple beauty, addressed 
 to the eye alone, yet often what impresses us 
 most will form but a very small portion of that 
 visible beauty. That beauty may, for instance, 
 be composed of lovely flowers, and glittering 
 streams, and blue sky and white clouds ; and 
 yet the thing that impresses us most, and which 
 we should be sorriest to lose, may be a thin 
 grey film on the extreme horizon, not so large, 
 in the space of the scene it occupies, as a piece 
 of gossamer on a near-at-hand bush, nor in any 
 wise prettier to the eye than the gossamer ; but 
 because the gossamer is known by us for a little 
 bit of spider's work, and the other grey film is 
 known to mean a mountain ten thousand feet 
 high, inhabited by a race of noble mountaineers, 
 we are solemnly impressed by the aspect of it, 
 and yet all the while the thoughts and know- 
 ledge which cause us to receive this impression 
 are so obscure that we are not conscious of 
 them. 
 
 17. Examine the nature of your own emo- 
 tion, (if you feel it,) at the sight of the Alps ; 
 and you find all the brightness of that emotion
 
 22 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 hanging, like dew on a gossamer, on a curious 
 web of subtle fancy and imperfect knowledge. 
 First you have a vague idea of its size, coupled 
 Avith wonder at the work of the great Builder 
 of its walls and foundations ; then an apprehen- 
 sion of its eternity, a pathetic sense of its per- 
 petualness, and your own traiisientness, as of 
 the grass upon its sides ; then, and in very 
 sadness, a sense of strange companionship with 
 past generations, in seeing what they saw. 
 They did not see the clouds that are floating 
 over your head, nor the cottage wall on the other 
 side of the field, nor the road by which you 
 are travelling. But they saw that. The wall of 
 granite in the heavens was the same to them as 
 to you. They have ceased to look upon it ; you 
 will soon cease to look also, and the granite 
 wall will be for others. Then, mingled with 
 these more solemn imaginations, come the un- 
 derstandings of the gifts and glories of the Alp ; 
 the fancying forth of all the fountains that 
 well from its rocky walls, and strong rivers 
 that are born out of its ice, and of all the 
 pleasant valleys that wind between its cliffs, 
 and all the chalets that gleam among its
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 23 
 
 clouds, and happy farmsteads couched upon 
 its pastures ; while, together with the thoughts 
 of these, rise strange sympathies with all the 
 unknown of human life, and happiness, and 
 death, signified by that narrow white flame of 
 the everlasting snow, seen so far in the morn- 
 ing sky. These images, and far more than 
 these, lie at the root of the emotion which you 
 feel at the sight of the Alps. You may not 
 trace them in your heart, for there is a great 
 deal more in your heart, both of evil and good, 
 than you can ever trace ; but they stir you and 
 quicken you for all that. Assuredly, so far as 
 you feel more at beholding the snowy mountain 
 than any other object of the same sweet silvery 
 grey, these are the kind of images which cause 
 you to do so ; and observe, these are nothing 
 more than a greater apprehension of the facts 
 of the thing. We call the power ' Imagination,' 
 because it imagines or conceives ; but it is only 
 noble imagination, if it imagines or conceives 
 the truth. And according to the degree of know- 
 ledge possessed, and of sensibility to the pathetic 
 or impressive character of the things known, 
 will be the degree of this imaginative delight.
 
 24 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 18. So natural is it to the human heart to fix 
 itself in hope rather than in present possession, 
 and so subtle is the charm which the imagina- 
 tion casts over what is distant or denied, that 
 there is often- a more touching power in the 
 scenes which contain far-away promise of some- 
 thing greater than themselves, than in those 
 which exhaust the treasures and powers of 
 nature in an unconquerable and excellent glory, 
 leaving nothing more to be by fancy pictured 
 or pursued. I do not know that there is a 
 district in the world more calculated to illus- 
 trate this power of the expectant imagination 
 than that which surrounds the city of Friburg 
 in Switzerland, extending from it towards 
 Berne. It is of grey sandstone, considerably 
 elevated, but presenting no object of striking 
 interest to the passing traveller ; so that as it 
 is generally seen in the course of a hasty 
 journey from the Bernese Alps to those of 
 Savoy, it is rarely regarded with any other 
 sensation than that of weariness, all the more 
 painful because accompanied with reaction from 
 the high excitement caused by the splendour of 
 the Bernese Oberland. The traveller foot-sore,
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 25 
 
 feverish, and satiated with glacier and precipice, 
 lies back in the corner of the diligence, per- 
 ceiving little more than that the road is winding 
 and hilly, and the country through which it 
 passes, cultivated and tame. Let him, however, 
 only do this tame country the justice of staying 
 in it a few days, until his mind has recovered 
 its tone, and take one or two long walks 
 through its fields, and he will have other 
 thoughts of it. It is, as I said, an undulating 
 district of grey sandstone, never attaining any 
 considerable height, but having enough of the 
 mountain spirit to throw itself into continual 
 succession of bold slope and dale ; elevated, also, 
 just far enough above the sea to render the 
 pine a frequent forest tree along its irregular 
 ridges. Through this elevated tract the river 
 cuts its way in a ravine some five or six hun- 
 dred feet in depth, which winds for leagues 
 between the gentle hills, unthought of until its 
 edge is approached; and then, suddenly, through 
 the boughs of the firs, the eye perceives, be- 
 neath, the green and gliding stream, and the 
 broad walls of sandstone cliff that form its 
 banks ; hollowed out where the river leans
 
 26 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 against them at its turns, into perilous over- 
 hanging ; and, on the other shore, at the same 
 spots, leaving little breadths of meadow between 
 them and the water, half overgrown with thicket, 
 deserted in their sweetness, inaccessible from 
 above, and rarely visited by any curious wan- 
 derers along the hardly traceable footpath which 
 struggles for existence beneath the rocks. And 
 there the river ripples, and eddies and murmurs 
 in an utter solitude. It is passing through a 
 thickly peopled country ; but never was a 
 stream so lonely. The feeblest and most far 
 away torrent among the high hills has its com- 
 panions; the goats browse beside it; and the 
 traveller drinks from it, and passes over it with 
 his staff; and the peasant traces a new channel 
 for it down to his mill-wheel. But this stream 
 has no companions ; it flows on in an infinite 
 seclusion, not secret, nor threatening, but a 
 quietness of sweet daylight and open air 
 a broad space of tender and deep desolateness, 
 drooped into repose out of the midst of human 
 labour and life ; the waves plashing lowly, with 
 none to hear them ; and the wild birds building 
 in the boughs, with none to fray them away ;
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 27 
 
 and the soft, fragrant herbs rising and breathing 
 and fading, with no hand to gather them ; and 
 yet all bright and bare to the clouds above, 
 and to the fresh fall of the passing sunshine 
 and pure rain. But above the brows of these 
 scarped cliffs, all is in an instant changed. A 
 few steps only beyond the firs that stretch their 
 branches, angular, and wild, and white, like 
 forks of lightning, into the air of the ravine, 
 and we are in an arable country of the most 
 perfect richness ; the swathes of its corn glow- 
 ing and burning from field to field ; its pretty 
 hamlets all vivid with fruitful orchards, and 
 flowery gardens, and goodly with steep-roofed 
 store- house and barn; its well-kept, hard, park- 
 like roads rising and falling from hillside to 
 hillside, or disappearing among brown banks 
 of moss, and thickets of the wild raspberry and 
 rose ; or gleaming through lines of tall trees, 
 half glade, half avenue, where the gate opens, 
 or the gateless path turns trustedly aside, 
 unhindered, into the garden of some statelier 
 house, surrounded in rural pride with its golden 
 hives, and carved granaries, and irregular do- 
 main of latticed and espaliered cottages, glad-
 
 28 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 dening to look upon in their delicate homeliness 
 delicate, yet, in some sort, rude ; not like our 
 English homes trim, laborious, formal, irre- 
 proachable in comfort but with a peculiar 
 carelessness and largeness in all their detail, 
 harmonizing with the outlawed loveliness of 
 their country. For there is an untamed 
 strength even in all that soft and habitable 
 land. It is indeed gilded with corn, and fra- 
 grant with deep grass, but it is not subdued to 
 the plough or to the scythe. It gives at its 
 own free will ; it seems to have nothing wrested 
 from it, nor conquered in it. It is not redeemed 
 from desertness, but unrestrained in fruitfulness, 
 a generous land, bright with capricious plenty, 
 and laughing from vale to vale in fitful fulness, 
 kind and wild. Nor this without some sterner 
 element mingled in the heart of it. For, along 
 all its ridges stand the dark masses of innu- 
 merable pines,* taking no part in its gladness, 
 asserting themselves for ever as fixed shadows, 
 
 * Almost the only pleasure I have, myself, in re- 
 reading my old books, is my sense of having at least 
 done justice to the pine. Compare the passage in this 
 book, No. 47.
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 29 
 
 not to be pierced or banished even in the 
 intensest sunlight ; fallen flakes and fragments 
 of the night, stayed in their solemn squares 
 in the midst of all the rosy bendings of the 
 orchard boughs and yellow effulgence of the har- 
 vest, and tracing themselves in black net-work 
 and motionless fringes against the blanched 
 blue of the horizon in its saintly clearness. And 
 yet they do not sadden the landscape, but seem 
 to have been set there chiefly to show how 
 bright everything else is round them ; and all 
 the clouds look of pure silver, and all the air 
 seems filled with a whiter and more living 
 sunshine, where they are pierced by the sable 
 points of the pines ; and all the pastures look 
 of more glowing green where they run up 
 between the purple trunks ; and the sweet field 
 footpaths skirt the edges of the forest for the 
 sake of its shade, sloping up and down about 
 the slippery roots, and losing themselves every 
 now and then hopelessly among the violets and 
 ground-ivy and brown sheddings of the fibrous 
 leaves, and at last plunging into some open 
 aisle, where the light through the distant stems 
 shows that there is a chance of coming out
 
 30 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 again on the other side ; and coming out indeed 
 in a little while from the scented darkness 
 into the dazzling air and marvellous landscape, 
 which stretches still farther and farther in new 
 wilfulness of grove and garden, until at last the 
 craggy mountains of the Simmenthal rise out 
 of it, sharp into the rolling of the southern 
 clouds. 
 
 19.* Although there are few districts of 
 Northern Europe, however apparently dull or 
 tame, in which I cannot find pleasure, though 
 the whole of Northern France (except Cham- 
 pagne), dull as it seems to most travellers, is to 
 me a perpetual Paradise ; and, putting Lincoln- 
 shire, Leicestershire, and one or two such other 
 perfectly flat districts aside, there is not an 
 English county which I should not find enter- 
 tainment in exploring the cross-roads of, foot 
 
 * This, and the following passage, have nothing to do 
 with the general statements in the book. They occur 
 with reference only to my own idiosyncrasy. I was 
 much surprised when I found first how individual it 
 was, by a Pre-Raphaelite painter's declaring a piece 
 of unwholesome reedy fen to be more beautiful than 
 Benvenue.
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. 31 
 
 by foot, yet all my best enjoyment would be 
 owing to the imagination of the hills, colouring 
 with their far-away memories every lowland 
 stone and herb. The pleasant French coteau, 
 green in the sunshine, delights me either by 
 what real mountain character it has in itself, 
 (for in extent and succession* of promontory, 
 the flanks of the French valleys have quite the 
 sublimity of true mountain distances,) or by its 
 broken ground and rugged steps among the 
 vines, and rise of the leafage above against the 
 blue sky, as it might rise at Vevay or Como. 
 There is not a wave of the Seine, but is asso- 
 ciated in my mind with the first rise of the 
 sandstones and forest pines of Fontainebleau ; 
 and with the hope of the Alps, as one leaves 
 Paris, with the horses' heads to the south- 
 west, the morning sun flashing on the bright 
 waves at Charenton. If there be no hope 
 or association of this kind, and if I cannot 
 deceive myself into fancying that perhaps at 
 the next rise of the road there may be the 
 film of a blue hill in the gleam of sky at the 
 horizon, the landscape, however beautiful, pro- 
 duces in me even a kind of sickness and
 
 32 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 pain ; and the whole view from Richmond 
 Hill or Windsor Terrace, nay, the gardens 
 of Alcinous, with their perpetual summer 
 or of the Hesperides, (if they were flat, and 
 not close to Atlas), golden apples and all, I 
 would give away in an instant, for one mossy 
 granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of 
 lady fern. 
 
 20. I cannot find words to express the intense 
 pleasure I have always in first finding myself, 
 after some prolonged stay in England, at the 
 foot of the old tower of Calais church. The 
 large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it ; the 
 record of its years written so visibly, yet 
 without sign of weakness or decay ; its stern 
 wasteness and gloom, eaten away by the 
 Channel winds, and overgrown with the bitter 
 sea grasses ; its slates and tiles all shaken and 
 rent, and yet not falling ; its desert of brick- 
 work, full of bolts, and holes, and ugly fissures, 
 and yet strong, like a bare brown rock ; its 
 carelessness of what any one thinks or feels 
 about it, putting forth no claim, having no 
 beauty, nor desireableness, pride, nor grace ;
 
 POWER AND OFFICE OF IMAGINATION. p 33 
 
 yet neither asking for pity ; not, as ruins are, 
 useless and piteous, feebly or fondly garrulous 
 of better days ; but, useful still, going through 
 its own daily work, as some old fisherman, 
 beaten grey by storm, yet drawing his daily 
 nets, so it stands, with no complaint about its 
 past youth, in blanched and meagre massiveness 
 and serviceableness, gathering human souls 
 together underneath it ; the sound of its bells 
 for prayer still rolling through its rents ; and 
 the grey peak of it seen far across the sea, 
 principal of the three that rise above the waste 
 of surfy sand and hillocked shore, the light- 
 house for life, and the belfry for labour, and 
 this, for patience and praise. 
 
 I cannot tell the half of the strange plea- 
 sures and thoughts that come about me at 
 the sight of that old tower ; for, in some sort, 
 it is the epitome of all that makes the con- 
 tinent of Europe interesting, as opposed to 
 new countries ; and, above all, it completely 
 expresses that agedness in the midst of 
 active life which binds the old and the new 
 into harmony. We in England have our new 
 streets, our new inn our green shaven lawn, 
 
 3
 
 34- FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 and our piece of ruin emergent from it, a mere 
 specimen of the middle ages put on a bit of 
 velvet carpet, to be shown ; and which, but for 
 its size, might as well be on a museum shelf at 
 once, under cover : but, on the Continent, the 
 links are unbroken between the past and pre- 
 sent ; and, in such use as they can serve for, 
 the grey headed wrecks are suffered to stay 
 with men ; while, in unbroken line, the genera- 
 tions of spared buildings are seen succeeding, 
 each in its place. And thus, in its largeness, 
 in its permitted evidence of slow decline, in 
 its poverty, in its absence of all pretence, of all 
 show and care for outside aspect, that Calais 
 tower has an infinite of symbolism in it, all the 
 more striking because usually seen in contrast 
 with English scenes expressive of feelings the 
 exact reverse of these.* 
 
 * My friend won't write out the reverse ! Our 
 book is to be all jelly, and no powder, it seems. 
 Well, I'm very thankful she likes the jelly, at any 
 rate, it makes me sure that it is well made.
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE ; THE SKY. 35 
 
 SECTION III. 
 
 ILLUSTKATIVE : THE SKY. 
 
 21. IT is a strange thing how little in general 
 people know about the sky. It is the part of 
 creation in which Nature has done more for the 
 sake of pleasing man more for the sole and 
 evident purpose of talking to him, and teaching 
 him than in any other of her works ; and it is 
 just the part in which we least attend to ner. 
 There are not many of her other works in which 
 some more material or essential purpose than 
 the mere pleasing of man is not answered by 
 every part of their organization ; but every 
 essential purpose of the sky might, so far as 
 we know, be answered if once in three days, 
 or thereabouts, a great, ugly, black rain-aloud 
 were brought up over the blue, and everything 
 well watered, and so all left blue again till next 
 time, with perhaps a film of morning and
 
 36 FliONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 evening mist for dew and instead of this, 
 there is not a moment of any day of our lives, 
 when Nature is not producing scene after scene, 
 picture after picture, glory after glory, and 
 working still upon such exquisite and constant 
 principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is 
 quite certain* it is all done for us, and in- 
 tended for our perpetual pleasure. And every 
 man, wherever placed, however far from other 
 sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing 
 for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the 
 earth can be seen and known but by few ; it is 
 not intended that man should live always in the 
 midst of them ; he injures them by his presence, 
 he ceases to feel them if he is always with 
 them ; but the sky is for all : bright as it is, it 
 
 is not 
 
 " too bright nor good 
 For human nature's daily food " ; 
 
 it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual 
 comfort and exalting of the heart, for soothing 
 
 * At least, I thought so, when I was four-arid- 
 twenty. At five-and-fifty, I fancy that it is just pos- 
 sible there may be other creatures in the universe, 
 to be pleased, or, it may be, displeased, by the 
 weather.
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY. 37 
 
 it, and purifying it from its dross and dust. 
 Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, some- 
 times awful never the same for two moments 
 together ; almost human in its passions, almost 
 spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its 
 infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us 
 is as distinct, as its ministry of chastisement 
 or of blessing to what is mortal is essential. 
 And yet we never attend to it, we never make 
 it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with 
 our animal sensations, we look upon all by 
 which it speaks to us more clearly than to 
 brutes, upon all which bears witness to the 
 intention of the Supreme that we are to receive 
 more from fhe covering Vault than the light 
 and the dew which we share with the weed and 
 the worm, only as a succession of meaningless 
 and monotonous accident, too common and too 
 vain to be worthy of a moment of watchful- 
 ness, or a glance of admiration. If in our 
 moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we 
 turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its 
 phenomena do we speak of? One says, it has 
 been wet ; and another, it has been windy, and 
 another, it has been warm. Who among the
 
 38 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 whole chattering crowd can tell one of the 
 forms and the precipices of the chain of tall 
 white mountains that girded the horizon at 
 noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sun- 
 beam that came out of the south, and smot6 
 upon their summits until they melted and 
 mouldered away in a dust of blue rain ? 
 Who saw r the dance of the dead clouds when 
 the sunlight left them last night, and the 
 west wind blew them before it like withered 
 leaves? All has passed unregretted as un- 
 seen ; or if the apathy be ever shaken off 
 even for an instant, it is only by what is 
 gross, or what is extraordinary. And yet it' 
 is not in the broad and fierce manifestations 
 of the elemental energies, nor in the clash of 
 the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that 
 the highest characters of the sublime are de- 
 veloped. God is not in the earthquake, nor in 
 the fire, but in the still small voice. They are 
 but the blunt and the low faculties of our 
 nature, which can only be addressed through 
 lamp-black and lightning. It is in quiet and 
 unsubdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the 
 deep and the calm, and the perpetual ; that
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY. 39 
 
 which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved 
 ere it is understood ; things which the angels 
 work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally ; 
 which are never wanting, and never repeated, 
 which are to be found always, yet each found 
 but once : it is through these that the lesson of 
 
 * ^5 
 
 devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing 
 of beauty given. 
 
 22. We habitually think of the rain-cloud 
 only as dark and grey ; not knowing that 
 we owe to it perhaps the fairest, though not 
 the most dazzling, of the hues of heaven. 
 Often in our English mornings, the rain-clouds 
 in the dawn form soft, level fields, which melt 
 imperceptibly into the blue ; or, when of less 
 extent, gather into apparent bars, crossing the 
 sheets of broader clouds above ; and all these 
 bathed throughout in an unspeakable light of 
 pure rose-colour, and purple, and amber, and 
 blue ; not shining, but misty-soft ; the barred 
 masses, when seen nearer, composed of clusters 
 or tresses of cloud, like floss silk ; looking as 
 if each knot were a little swathe or sheaf of 
 lighted rain.
 
 40 FRONDES AGKESTES. 
 
 23. Aqueous vapour or mist, suspended in the 
 atmosphere, becomes visible exactly as dust does 
 in the air of a room. In the shadows, you not 
 only cannot see the dust itself, because unillu- 
 mined, but you can see other objects through 
 the dust, without obscurity ; the air being thus 
 actually rendered more transparent by a de- 
 privation of light. Where a sunbeam enters, 
 every particle of dust becomes visible, and a 
 palpable interruption to the sight ; so that a 
 transverse sunbeam is a real obstacle to the 
 vision you cannot see things clearly through 
 it. In the same way, wherever vapour is illu- 
 minated by transverse rays, there it becomes 
 visible as a whiteness more or less affecting the 
 purity- of the blue, and destroying it exactly in 
 proportion to the degree of illumination. But 
 where vapour is in shade, it has very little 
 effect on the sky, perhaps making it a little 
 deeper and greyer than it otherwise would 
 be, but not, itself, unless very dense, distin- 
 guishable or felt as mist. 
 
 24. Has the reader any distinct idea of what 
 clouds are ?
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY. 41 
 
 * That mist which lies in the morning so 
 softly in the valley, level and white, through 
 which the tops of the trees rise as if through 
 an inundation why is it so heavy, and why 
 does it lie so low, being yet so thin and frail 
 that it will melt away utterly into splendour of 
 morning when the sun has shone on it but a 
 few moments more ? Those colossal pyramids, 
 huge and firm, with outlines as of rocks, and 
 strength to bear the beating of the high sun 
 full on their fiery flanks, why are they so 
 light, their bases high over our heads, high over 
 the heads of Alps ? Why will these melt away, 
 not as the sun rises, but as he descends, and 
 leave the stars of twilight clear ; while the valley 
 vapour gains again upon the earth, like a 
 shroud ? Or that ghost of a cloud, which steals 
 by yonder clump of pines ; nay, which does not 
 steal by them, but haunts them, wreathing yet 
 round them, and yet, and yet, slowly ; now 
 falling in a fair waved line like a woman's veil ; 
 now fading, now gone ; we look away for an 
 instant, and look back, and it is again there. 
 
 * This is a fifth volume bit, and worth more atten- 
 tion.
 
 42 FRONDES AGEESTES. 
 
 What has it to do with that clump of pines, that 
 it broods by them, and weaves itself among 
 their branches, to and fro ? Has it hidden a 
 cloudy treasure among the moss at their roots, 
 which it watches thus? Or has some strong 
 enchanter charmed it into fond returning, or 
 bound it fast within those bars of bough ? And 
 yonder filmy crescent, bent like an archer's 
 bow above the snowy summit, the highest of all 
 the hills that white arch which never forms but 
 over the supreme crest, how it is stayed there, 
 repelled apparently from the snow, nowhere 
 touching it, the clear sky seen between it and 
 the mountain edge, yet never leaving it poised 
 as a white bird hovers over its nest I Or those 
 war clouds that gather on the horizon, dragon- 
 crested, tongued with fire, how is their barbed 
 strength bridled? What bits are those they 
 are champing with their vapourous lips, flinging 
 off flakes of black foam ? Leagued leviathans 
 of the Sea of Heaven, out of their nostrils 
 goeth smoke, and their eyes are like the eyelids 
 of the morning; the sword of him that layeth 
 at them cannot hold the spear, the dart, nor the 
 habergeon. Where ride the captains of their
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY. 43 
 
 armies ? "Where are set the measures of their 
 march? Fierce murmurers, answering each 
 other from morning until evening what rebuke 
 is this which has awed them into peace ; what 
 hand has reined them back by the way in 
 which they came? 
 
 I know not if the reader will think at first 
 that questions like these are easily answered. 
 So far from it, I rather believe that some of 
 the mysteries of the clouds never will be 
 understood by us at all. "Knowest thou the 
 balancings of the clouds ? " Is the answer 
 ever to be one of pride ? The wondrous works 
 of Him, which is perfect in knowledge? Is 
 our knowledge ever to be so? .... 
 
 For my own part, I enjoy the mystery, and 
 perhaps the reader may. I think he ought. 
 He should not be less grateful for summer rain, 
 or see less beauty in the clouds of morning, be- 
 cause they come to prove him with hard ques- 
 tions ; to which perhaps, if we look close at the 
 heavenly scroll, we may find also a syllable or 
 two of answer, illuminated here and there.* 
 
 * Compare, in ' Sartor Resartus,' the boy's watching 
 from the garden wall.
 
 44 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 And though the climates of the south and 
 east may be comparatively clear, they are no 
 more absolutely clear than our own northern 
 air. Intense clearness, whether, in the north, 
 after or before rain, or in some moments of 
 twilight in the south, is always, as far as I 
 am acquainted with natural phenomena, a 
 notable thing. Mist of some sort, or mirage, 
 or confusion of light or of cloud, are the 
 general facts ; the distance may vary in dif- 
 ferent climates at which the effects of mist 
 begin, but they are always present ; and 
 therefore, in all probability, it is meant that 
 
 we should enjoy them We surely 
 
 need not wonder that mist and all its phe- 
 nomena have been made delightful to us, since 
 our happiness as thinking beings must depend 
 on our being content to accept only partial 
 knowledge even in those matters which chiefly 
 concern us. If we insist upon perfect intelligi- 
 bility and complete declaration in every moral 
 subject, we shall instantly fall into misery of 
 unbelief. Our whole happiness and power of 
 energetic action depend upon our being able to 
 breathe and live in the cloud ; content to see it
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY. 43 
 
 opening here, and closing there ; rejoicing to 
 catch through the thinnest films of it, glimpses 
 of stable and substantial things ; but yet per- 
 ceiving a nobleness even in the concealment, 
 and rejoicing that the kindly veil is spread 
 where the untempered light might have 
 scorched us, or the infinite clearness wearied. 
 And I believe that the resentment of this 
 interference of the mist is one of the forms 
 of proud error which are too easily mistaken 
 for virtues. To be content in utter darkness 
 and ignorance is indeed unmanly, and there- 
 fore we think that to love light and find 
 knowledge must always be right. Yet (as in 
 all matters before observed,) wherever pride 
 has any share in the work, even knowledge 
 and light may be ill pursued. Knowledge is 
 good, and light is good ; yet man perished, 
 in seeking knowledge, and moths perish in 
 seeking light ; and if we, who are crushed 
 before the moth, will not accept such mystery 
 as is needful to us, we shall perish in like 
 manner. But, accepted in humbleness, it 
 instantly becomes an element of pleasure ; and 
 I think that every rightly constituted mind
 
 46 FKONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 ought to rejoice, not so much in knowing 
 anything clearly, as in feeling that there is 
 infinitely more which it cannot know. None 
 but proud or weak men would mourn over 
 this, for we may always know more, if we 
 choose, by working on ; but the pleasure is, 
 I think, to humble people, in knowing that 
 the journey is endless, the treasure inexhaus- 
 tible, watching the cloud still march before 
 them with its summitless pillar, and being 
 sure that, to the end of time, and to the length 
 of eternity, the mysteries of its infinity will 
 still open farther and farther, their dimness 
 being the sign and necessary adjunct of 
 their inexhaustibleness. I know there are an 
 evil mystery, and a deathful dimness, the 
 mystery of the great Babylon the dimness 
 of the sealed eye and soul ; but do not let us 
 confuse these with the glorious mystery of 
 the things which the angels "desire to look 
 into," or with the dimness which, even before 
 the clear eye and open soul, still rests on sealed 
 pages of the eternal volume. 
 
 25. On some isolated mountain at day-
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : THE SKY. 47 
 
 break,* when the night mists first rise from 
 off the plain, watch their white and lake- 
 like fields, as they float in level bays, and 
 winding gulfs about the islanded summits of 
 the lower hills, untouched yet by more than 
 dawn, colder and more quiet than a windless 
 sea under the moon of midnight ; watch when 
 the first sunbeam is sent upon the silver chan- 
 nels, how the foam of their undulating surface 
 parts, and passes away, and down under their 
 depths the glittering city and green pasture lie 
 like Atlantis, between the white paths of wind- 
 ing riverts ; the flakes of light falling every 
 moment faster and broader among the starry 
 spires, as the wreathed surges break and vanish 
 above them, and the confused crests and ridges 
 of the dark hills shorten their grey shadows 
 upon the plain. Wait a little longer, and you 
 
 * I forget now what all this is about. It seems to 
 be a recollection of the Rigi, with assumption that 
 the enthusiastic spectator is to stand for a day and 
 night in observation ; to suffer the effects of a severe 
 thunder-storm, and to get neither breakfast nor dinner. 
 I have seen such a storm on the Rigi, however, and 
 more than one such sunrise ; and I much doubt if its 
 present visitors by rail will see more.
 
 48 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 shall see those scattered mists rallying in the 
 ravines, and floating up towards you, along the 
 winding valleys, till they couch in quiet masses, 
 iridescent with the morning light, upon the 
 broad breasts of the higher hills, whose leagues 
 of massy undulation will melt back, back into 
 that robe of material light, until they fade away, 
 and set in its lustre, to appear again 'above in 
 the serene heaven like a wild, bright, impossible 
 dream, foundationless, and inaccessible, their 
 very bases vanishing in the unsubstantial and 
 mocking blue of the deep lake below. Wait 
 yet a little longer, and you shall see those mists 
 gather themselves into white towers, and stand 
 like fortresses along the promontories, massy 
 and motionless, only piled with every instant 
 higher and higher into the sky, and casting 
 longer shadows athwart the rocks ; and out of 
 the pale blue of the horizon you will see forming 
 and advancing a troop of narrow, dark, pointed 
 vapours, which will cover the sky, inch by inch, 
 with their grey network, and take the light 
 off the landscape with an eclipse which will 
 stop the singing of the birds, and the motion 
 of the leaves, together; and then you will
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : THE SKY. 49 
 
 see horizontal bars of black shadow forming 
 under them, and lurid wreaths create them- 
 selves, you know not how, among the shoulders 
 of the hills ; you never see them form, but when 
 you look back to a place which was clear an 
 instant ago, there is a cloud on it, hanging 
 by the precipice, as a hawk pauses over his 
 prey ; and then you will hear the sudden rush 
 of the awakened wind, and you will see those 
 watch-towers of vapour swept away, from their 
 foundations, and waving curtains of opaque 
 rain let down to the valley, swinging from the 
 burdened clouds in black bending fringes, or, 
 pacing in pale columns along the lake level, 
 grazing its surface into foam as they go. And 
 then as the sun sinks, you shall see the storm 
 drift for an instant from off the hills, leaving 
 their broad sides smoking and loaded yet with 
 snow-white, torn, steam-like rags of capricious 
 vapour, now gone, now gathered again, while 
 the smouldering sun, seeming not far away, but 
 burning like a red-hot ball beside you, and 
 as if you could reach it, plunges through the 
 rushing wind and rolling cloud with headlong 
 fall, as if it meant to rise no more, dyeing all 
 
 4
 
 50 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 the air about it with blood ; and then you shall 
 hear the fainting tempest die in the hollow of 
 of the night, and you shall see a green halo 
 kindling on the summit of the eastern hills, 
 brighter, brighter yet, till the large white circle 
 of the slow moon is lifted up among the barred 
 clouds, step by step, line by line ; star after 
 star she quenches with her kindling light, 
 setting in their stead an army of pale, pene- 
 trable, fleecy wreaths in the heaven, to give 
 light upon the earth, which move together hand 
 in hand, company by company, troop by troop, 
 so measured in their unity of motion that the 
 whole heaven seems to roll with them, and the 
 earth to reel under them. And then wait yet 
 for one hour, until the east again becomes 
 purple, and the heaving mountains, rolling 
 against it in darkness, like waves of a wild sea, 
 are drowned one by one in the glory of its 
 burning ; watch the white glaciers blaze in 
 their winding paths about the mountains, like 
 mighty serpents with scales of fire : watch 
 the columnar peaks of solitary snow, kindling 
 downwards chasm by chasm, each in itself a 
 new morning their long avalanches cast down
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY. 51 
 
 in keen streams brighter than the lightning, 
 sending each his tribute of driven snow, like 
 altar-smoke up to heaven ; the rose-light of 
 their silent domes flushing that heaven about 
 them, and above them, piercing with purer light 
 through its purple lines of lifted cloud, casting 
 a new glory on every wreath, as it passes by, 
 until the whole heaven, one scarlet canopy, is 
 interwoven with a roof of waving flame, and 
 tossing vault beyond vault, as with the drifted 
 wings of many companies of angels : and then 
 when you can look no more for gladness, and 
 when you are bowed down with fear and love 
 of the Maker and Doer of this, tell me who has 
 best delivered this His message unto men ! 
 
 26. *The account given of the stages of crea- 
 tion in the first chapter of Genesis is in every 
 respect clear and intelligible to the simplest 
 reader, except in the statement of the work of 
 the second day. I suppose that this statement 
 
 * This passage, to the end of the section, is one of 
 the last, and best, which I wrote in the temper of my 
 youth ; and I can still ratify it, thus far, that the 
 texts referred to in it must either be received as it 
 explains them, or neglected altogether.
 
 52 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 is passed over by careless readers without any 
 endeavour to understand it, and contemplated 
 by simple and faithful readers as a sublime 
 mystery which was not intended to be under- 
 stood. But there is no mystery in any other 
 part of the chapter, and it seems to me unjust 
 to conclude that any was intended here. And 
 the passage ought to be peculiarly interesting 
 to us, as being the first in the Bible in which 
 the heavens are named, and the only one in 
 which the word " Heaven," all important as 
 that word is to our understanding of the most 
 precious promises of Scripture, receives a defi- 
 nite explanation. Let us therefore see whether, 
 by a little careful comparison of the verse with 
 other passages in which the word occurs, we 
 may not be able to arrive at as clear an under- 
 standing of this portion of the chapter as of 
 the rest. In the first place the English word, 
 " Firmament" itself is obscure and useless ; 
 because we never employ it but as a synonym 
 of heaven, it conveys no other distinct idea to 
 us ; and the verse, though from our familiarity 
 with it we imagine that it possesses meaning, 
 has in reality no more point nor value than if it
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : THE SKY. 53 
 
 were written, " God said, Let there be a some- 
 thing in the midst of the waters, and God called 
 the something, Heaven." But the marginal 
 
 O' O 
 
 reading, " Expansion," has definite value ; and 
 the statement that God said, Let there be an 
 expansion in the midst of the waters, and "God 
 called the expansion, Heaven," has an appre- 
 hensible meaning. Accepting this expression 
 as the one intended, we have next to ask what 
 expansion there is, between two waters, descri- 
 bable by the term heaven. Milton adopts the 
 term " expanse," but he understands it of the 
 whole volume of the air which surrounds the 
 earth. Whereas, so far as we can tell, there 
 is no water beyond the air, in the fields of 
 space ; and the whole expression of division 
 of waters from waters is thus rendered value- 
 less. Now with respect to this whole chapter, 
 we must remember always that it is intended 
 for the instruction of all mankind, not for the 
 learned reader only ; and that therefore the 
 most simple and natural interpretation is the 
 likeliest in general to be the true one. An 
 unscientific reader knows little about the 
 manner in which the volume of the atnio-
 
 54 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 sphere surrounds the earth ; but I imagine 
 that he could hardly glance at the sky when 
 rain was falling in the distance, and see the 
 bvel line of the bases of the clouds from which 
 the shower descended, without beino- able to 
 
 / O 
 
 attach an instant and easy meaning to the 
 words, "expansion in the midst of the waters;" 
 and if, having once seized this idea, he pro- 
 ceeded to examine it more accurately, he would 
 perceive at once, if he had ever noticed any- 
 thing of the nature of clouds, that the level 
 line of their bases did indeed most severely and 
 stringently divide "waters from waters" that 
 is to say, divide water in its collective and 
 tangible state, from water in its aerial state ; 
 or the waters which fall, and flow, from those 
 which rise, and float. Next, if we try this inter- 
 pretation in the theological sense of the word 
 heaven, and examine whether the clouds are 
 spoken of as God's dwelling place, we find God 
 going before the Israelites in a pillar of cloud ; 
 revealing Himself in a cloud on Sinai ; appear- 
 ing in a cloud on the mercy-seat, filling the 
 Temple of Solomon with the cloud when its 
 dedication is accepted ; appearing in a great
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY. DO 
 
 cloud to Ezekiel ; ascending into a cloud before 
 the eyes of the disciples on Mount Olivet ; and 
 in like manner returning to judgment : " Be- 
 hold he cometh with clouds, and every eye shall 
 see him." " Then shall they see the Son of Man 
 coming in the clouds of heaven, with power 
 and great glory." While further the "clouds" 
 and "heavens" are used as interchangeable 
 words in those Psalms which most distinctly 
 set forth the power of God : " He bowed the 
 heavens also, and came down ; he made dark- 
 ness pavilions round about him, dark waters, 
 and thick clouds of the skies." And again, 
 " Thy mercy, Lord, is in the heavens, and 
 thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds." 
 And again, " His excellency is over Israel, and 
 his strength is in the clouds." And again, 
 " The clouds poured out water, the skies sent 
 out a sound, the voice of thy thunder was in 
 the heaven." Again, " Clouds and darkness 
 are round about him, righteousness and judg- 
 ment are the habitation of his throne ; the 
 heavens declare his righteousness, and all the 
 people see his glory." In all these passages the 
 meaning is unmistakable if they possess definite
 
 56 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 meaning at all. We are too apt to take them 
 merely for sublime and vague imagery, and 
 therefore gradually to lose the apprehension 
 of their life and power. The expression, " He 
 bowed the heavens," for instance, is, I sup- 
 pose, received by most readers as a magnificent 
 hyperbole, having reference to some peculiar 
 and fearful manifestation of God's power to 
 the writer of the psalm in which the words 
 occur. But the expression either has plain 
 meaning, or it has no meaning. Understand 
 by the term "heavens " the compass of infinite 
 space around the earth, and the expression 
 " bowed the heavens," however sublime, is 
 wholly without meaning : infinite space cannot 
 be bent or bowed. But understand by the 
 " heavens " the veil of clouds above the earth, 
 and the expression is neither hyperbolical nor 
 obscure ; it is pure, plain, accurate truth, and 
 it describes God, not as revealing Himself in 
 any peculiar way to David, but doing what 
 He is still doing before our own eyes, day bv 
 day. By accepting the words in their simple 
 sense, we are thus led to apprehend the imme- 
 diate presence of the Deity, and His purpose of
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY. 57 
 
 manifesting Himself as near us whenever the 
 storm-cloud stoops upon its course ; while by 
 our vague and inaccurate acceptance of the 
 words, we remove the idea of His presence far 
 from us, into a region which we can neither see 
 nor know : and gradually, from the close reali- 
 zation of a living God, who " maketh the clouds 
 his chariot," we define and explain ourselves 
 into dim and distant suspicion of an inactive 
 God inhabiting inconceivable places, and fading 
 into the multitudinous formalisms of the laws 
 of Nature. All errors of this kind and in 
 the present day we are in constant and 
 grievous danger of falling into them arise 
 from the originally mistaken idea that man 
 can, " by searching, find out God find out the 
 Almighty to perfection" that is to say, by 
 help of courses of reasoning and accumulations 
 of science, apprehend the nature of the Deity, 
 in a more exalted and more accurate manner 
 than in a state of comparative ignorance ; 
 whereas it is clearly necessary, from the begin- 
 ning to the end of time, that God's way of 
 revealing Himself to His creatures should be 
 a simple way, which all those creatures may
 
 53 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 understand. Whether taught or untaught, 
 whether of mean capacity or enlarged, it is 
 necessary that communion with their Creator 
 should be possible to all ; and the admission to 
 such communion must be rested, not on their 
 having a knowledge of astronomy, but on their 
 having a human soul. In order to render this 
 communion possible, the Deity has stooped from 
 His throne, and has, not only in the person of 
 the Son, taken upon Him the veil of our 
 human flesli, but, in the person of the Father, 
 taken upon Him the veil of our human thoughts, 
 and permitted us, by His own spoken authority, 
 to conceive Him simply and clearly as a loving 
 father and friend ; a being to be walked with 
 and reasoned with, to be moved by our en- 
 treaties, angered by our rebellion, aliepated by 
 our coldness, pleased by our love, and glorified 
 by our labour ; and, finally, to be beheld in 
 immediate and active presence in all the powers 
 and changes of creation. This conception of 
 God, which is the child's, is evidently the only 
 one which can be universal, and, therefore, 
 the only one which for us can be true. The 
 moment that, in our pride of heart, we refuse to
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : THE SKY. 59 
 
 accept the condescension of the Almighty, and 
 desire Him, instead of stooping to hold our 
 hands, to rise up before us into His glory, we, 
 hoping that, by standing on a grain of dust 
 or two of human knowledge higher than our 
 fellows, we may behold the Creator as He rises, 
 God takes us at our word. He rises, into His 
 own invisible and inconceivable majesty ; He 
 goes forth upon the ways which are not our 
 ways, and retires into the thoughts which are 
 not our thoughts ; and we are left alone. And 
 presently we say in our vain hearts, " There is 
 no God." 
 
 I would desire, therefore, to receive God's 
 account of His own creation as under the 
 ordinary limits of human knowledge and ima- 
 gination it would be received by a simply 
 minded man ; and finding that the " heavens 
 and the earth " are spoken of always as having 
 something like equal relation to each other, 
 (" Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, 
 and all the host of them,") I reject at once 
 all idea of the term " heavens " being intended 
 to signify the infinity of space inhabited bv 
 countless worlds ; for between those infinite
 
 60 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 heavens and the particle of sand, which not 
 the earth only, but the sun itself, with all the 
 solar system, is, in relation to them, no relation 
 of equality or comparison could be inferred. 
 But I suppose the heavens to mean that part 
 of creation which holds equal companionship 
 with our globe ; I understand the " rolling of 
 these heavens together as a scroll," to be an 
 equal and relative destruction with the melting 
 of the elements in fervent heat ; and I under- 
 stand the making of the firmament to signify 
 that, so far as man is concerned, most magnifi- 
 cent ordinance of the clouds ; the ordinance 
 that as the great plain of waters was formed on 
 the face of the earth, so also a plain of waters 
 should be stretched along the height of air, and 
 the face of the cloud answer the face of the 
 ocean ; and that this upper and heavenly plain 
 should be of waters, as it were, glorified in 
 their nature, no longer quenching the fire, but 
 now bearing fire in their own bosoms ; no 
 longer murmuring only when the winds raise 
 them or rocks divide, but answering each other 
 with their own voices, from pole to pole ; no 
 longer restrained by established shores, and
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : THE SKY. 61 
 
 guided through unchanging channels ; but going 
 forth at their pleasure like the armies of the 
 angels, and choosing their encampments upon 
 the heights of the hills ; no longer hurried 
 downwards for ever, moving but to fall, nor 
 lost in the lightless accumulation of the abyss, 
 but covering the east and west with the waving 
 of their wings, and robing the gloom of the 
 farther -infinite with a vesture of diverse 
 colours, of which the threads are purple and 
 scarlet, and the embroideries flame. 
 
 This I believe is the ordinance of the 
 firmament ; and it seems to me that in the 
 midst of the material nearness of these 
 heavens, God means us to acknowledge His 
 own immediate presence as visiting, judging, 
 and blessing us : " The earth shook, the 
 heavens also dropped at the presence of God." 
 " He doth set bis bow in the clouds," and thus 
 renews, in the sound of every drooping swathe 
 of rain, His promises of everlasting love. " In 
 them he hath set a tabernacle for the sun ;" 
 whose burning ball, which, without the fir- 
 mament, would be seen but as an intolerable 
 and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity,
 
 62 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 is by that firmament surrounded with gorgeous 
 service, and tempered by mediatorial ministries : 
 by the firmament of clouds the temple is built, 
 for his presence to fill with light at noon ; by 
 the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed 
 at evening, round the sanctuary of his rest ; by 
 the mists of the firmament his implacable light 
 is divided, and its separated fierceness appeased 
 into the soft blue that fills the depth of distance 
 with its bloom, and the flush with which the 
 mountains burn, as they drink the overflowing 
 of the dayspring. And in this tabernacling of 
 the unendurable sun with men, through the sha- 
 dows of the firmament, God would seem to set 
 forth the stooping of His own Majesty to men, 
 upon the throne of the firmament. As the 
 Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter 
 of eternity, we cannot behold Him ; but as 
 the Judge of the earth and the Preserver of 
 men. those heavens are indeed His dwelling 
 
 ' O 
 
 place: " Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is 
 God's throne ; nor by the earth, for it is his 
 footstool ! " And all those passings to and fro 
 of fruitful showers and grateful shade, and 
 all those visions of silver palaces built about
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: THE SKY. 63 
 
 the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and 
 threatening thunders, and glories of coloured 
 robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in our 
 hearts the acceptance, and distinctness, and 
 dearness, of the simple words, " Our Father, 
 Avhich art in heaven."
 
 64 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 SECTION IV. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : STREAMS AND SEA. 
 
 27. OF all inorganic substances, acting in their 
 own proper nature, and without assistance and 
 combination, water is the most wonderful. If we 
 think of it as the source of all the changeful- 
 ness and beauty which we have seen in clouds 
 then, as the instrument by which the earth we 
 have contemplated was modelled into symmetry, 
 and its crags chiselled into grace; then, as in 
 the form of snow, it robes the mountains it has 
 made with that transcendent light which we 
 could not have conceived if we had not seen; 
 then as it exists in the foam of the torrent, 
 in the iris which spans it, in the morning 
 mist which rises from it, in the deep crystal- 
 line pools which mirror its hanging shore, 
 in the broad lake and glancing river finally, 
 in that which is to all human minds the best 
 emblem of unwearied, unconquerable power,
 
 ILLUSTEATIVE : STREAMS AND SEA. 65 
 
 the wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of 
 the sea ; what shall we compare to this mighty, 
 this universal element, for glory and beauty ? or 
 how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of 
 feeling ? It is like trying to paint a soul ! 
 
 28. The great angel of the sea rain ; the 
 angel, observe, the messenger sent to a special 
 place on a special errand. Not the diffused, per- 
 petual presence of the burden of mist, but the 
 going and returning of the intermittent cloud. 
 All turns upon that intermittence. Soft moss 
 on stone and rock ; cave fern of tangled glen ; 
 wayside well perennial, patient, silent, clear, 
 stealing through its square font of rough-hewn 
 stone ; ever thus deep, no more which the 
 winter wreck sullies not, the summer thirst 
 wastes not, incapable of stain as of decline 
 where the fallen leaf floats undecayed, and 
 the insect darts undefiling: cressed brook and 
 ever eddying river, lifted even in flood scarcely 
 over its stepping stones, but through all sweet 
 summer keeping tremulous music with harp- 
 strings of dark water among the silver fingering 
 of the pebbles. Far away in the south the 
 
 5
 
 66 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 strong river gods have all hasted, and gone 
 down to the sea. Wasted and burning, white 
 furnaces of blasting sand, their broad beds lie 
 ghastly and bare ; but here in the moss lands, 
 the soft wings of the sea angel droop still with 
 dew, and the shadows of their plumes falter 
 on the hills ; strange laughings and glitterings 
 of silver streamlets, born suddenly, and twined 
 about the mossy heights in trickling tinsel, 
 answering to them as they wave. 
 
 29. Stand for half an hour beside the fall 
 of Schaffhausen, on the north side, where the 
 rapids are long, and watch how the vault of 
 water first bends unbroken, in pure polished 
 velocity, over the arching rocks at the brow 
 of the cataract, covering them with a dome 
 of crystal twenty feet thick, so swift that its 
 motion is unseen except when a foam globe 
 from above darts over it like a falling star ; 
 and how the trees are lighted above it under 
 
 O 
 
 all their leaves,* at the instant that it breaks 
 into foam ; and how all the hollows of that 
 
 * Well noticed. The drawing of the fall of Schaff- 
 hausen, which I made at the time of writing this
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : STREAMS AXD SEA. G7 
 
 foam burn with green fire like so much 
 shattering chrysoprase ; and how, ever and 
 anon startling you with its white flash, a jet 
 of spray leaps hissing out of the fall, like a 
 rocket, bursting in the wind and driven away in 
 dust, filling the air with light ; and how through 
 the curdling wreaths of the restless crashing 
 abyss below, the blue of the water, paled by the 
 foam in its body, shows purer than the sky 
 through white rain- cloud, while the shudder- 
 ing iris stoops in tremulous stillness over all, 
 fading and flushing alternately through the 
 choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding 
 itself at last among the thick golden leaves 
 which toss to and fro in sympathy with the 
 wild water, their dripping masses lifted at 
 intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some 
 stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed 
 again upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies 
 away, the dew gushing from their thick 
 branches through drooping clusters of emerald 
 herbage, and sparkling in white threads along 
 
 study, was one of the very few, either by other 
 draughtsmen or myself, which I have seen Turner 
 pause at with serious attention.
 
 68 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 the dark rocks of the shore, feeding the lichens, 
 which chase and chequer them with purple and 
 silver. 
 
 30. Close beside the path by which travellers 
 ascend the Montanvertf from the valley of 
 Chamouni, on the right hand, where it first 
 begins to rise among the pines, there descends 
 a small stream from the foot of the granite 
 peak known to the guides as the Aiguille Char- 
 moz. It is concealed from the traveller by a 
 thicket of alder, and its murmur is hardly 
 heard, for it is one of the weakest streams of 
 the valley. But it is a constant stream, fed 
 by a permanent, though small, glacier ; and 
 continuing to flow even to the close of summer, 
 when more copious torrents, depending only on 
 the melting of the lower snows, have left their 
 beds, " stony channels in the sun." The long 
 drought which took place in the autumn of 
 1854, sealing every source of waters except 
 these perpetual ones, left the torrent of which I 
 am speaking, and such others, in a state pecu- 
 liarly favourable to observance of their least 
 action on the mountains from which they des-
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : STREAMS AND SEA. 69 
 
 cend. They were entirely limited to their own 
 ice fountains, and the quantity of powdered 
 rock which they brought down was, of course, 
 at its minimum, being nearly unmingled with 
 any earth derived from the dissolution of 
 softer soil, or vegetable mould, by rains. At 
 three in the afternoon, on a warm day in 
 September, when the torrent had reached its 
 average maximum strength for the day, I filled 
 an ordinary Bordeaux wine flask with the water 
 where it was least turbid. From this quart of 
 water I obtained twenty-four grains of sand 
 and sediment more or less fine. I cannot esti- 
 mate the quantity of water in the stream ; but 
 the runlet of it at which I filled the flask was 
 giving about two hundred bottles a minute, 
 or rather more, carrying down, therefore, 
 about three quarters of a pound of powdered 
 granite every minute. This would be forty- 
 five pounds an hour j but allowing for the 
 inferior power of the stream in the cooler 
 periods of the day, and taking into considera- 
 tion, on the other side, its increased power in 
 rain, we may, I think, estimate its average 
 hour's work at twenty-eight or thirty pounds,
 
 . 70 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 or a hundredweight every four hours. By 
 this insignificant runlet, therefore, rather more 
 than two tons of the substance of the Mont 
 Blanc are displaced and carried down a certain 
 distance every week ; and, as it is only for 
 three or four months that the flow of the 
 stream is checked by frost, we may certainly 
 allow eighty tons for the mass which it 
 annually moves. It is not worth while to 
 enter into any calculation of the relation borne 
 by this runlet to the great torrents which 
 descend from the chain of Mont Blanc into 
 the valley of Chamouni.* I but take this 
 quantity, eighty tons, as the result of the 
 labour of a scarcely noticeable runlet at the 
 side of one of them, utterly irrespective of 
 all sudden falls of stones and of masses of 
 mountain (a single thunderbolt will some- 
 times leave a scar on the flank of a soft 
 rock looking like a trench for a railroad), 
 and we shall then begin to apprehend some- 
 
 * I have slightly modified and abridged what fol- 
 lows, being impatient of its prolixity, as well as 
 ashamed of what is truly called the ludicrous under- 
 estimate of the mass of the larger streams.
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : STREAMS AND SEA. 71 
 
 thing of the operation of the great laws of 
 change which are the conditions of all material 
 existence, however apparently enduring. The 
 hills, which as compared with living beings 
 seem "everlasting," are in truth as perishing 
 as they; its veins of flowing fountain weary 
 the mountain heart, as the crimson pulse does 
 ours ; the natural form of the iron crag is 
 abated in its appointed time, like the strength 
 of the sinews in a human old age ; and it is 
 but the lapse of the longer years of decay 
 which, in the sight of its Creator, distinguishes 
 the mountain range from the moth and the 
 worm. 
 
 31. Few people, comparatively, have ever seen 
 the effect on the sea of a powerful gale continued 
 without intermission for three or four days and 
 nights ; and to those who have not, I believe it 
 must be unimaginable, not from the mere force 
 or size of surge, but from the complete anni- 
 hilation of the limit between sea and air. The 
 w r ater, from its prolonged agitation, is beaten, 
 not into mere creamy foam, but into masses 
 of accumulated yeast, which hang in ropes
 
 72 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 and wreaths from wave to wave ; and where 
 one curls over to break, form a festoon like 
 a drapery from its edge ; these are taken up 
 by the wind, not in dissipating dust, but 
 bodily, in writhing, hanging, coiling masses, 
 which make the air white, and thick as with 
 snow, only the flakes are a foot or two long 
 each ; the surges themselves are full of foam 
 in their very bodies, underneath, making them 
 white all through, as the water is under a great 
 cataract, and their masses being thus half 
 water and half air, are torn to pieces by the 
 wind whenever they rise, and carried away in 
 roaring smoke, which chokes and strangles like 
 actual water. Add to this, that when the air 
 has been exhausted of its moisture by long rain, 
 the spray of the sea is caught by it as de- 
 scribed above, and covers its surface not merely 
 with the smoke of finely divided water, but 
 with boiling mist : imagine also the low rain- 
 clouds brought down to the very level of the 
 sea, as I have often seen them, whirling and 
 flying in rags and fragments from wave to 
 wave ; and finally conceive the surges them- 
 selves in their utmost pitch of power, velocity,
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: STREAMS AND SKY. 73 
 
 vastness and madness, lifting themselves in 
 precipices and peaks furrowed with their whirl 
 of ascent, through all this chaos ; and you 
 will understand that there is indeed no distinc- 
 tion left between the sea and air ; that no 
 object, nor horizon, nor any landmark, or 
 natural evidence of position is left ; that the 
 heaven is all spray, and the ocean all cloud, and 
 that you can see no further in any direction 
 than you could see through a cataract.* 
 
 * The whole of this was written merely to show 
 the meaning of Turner's picture of the steamer in 
 distress, throwing up signals. It is a good study of 
 wild weather ; but, separate from its aim, utterly 
 feeble in comparison to the few words by which any 
 of the great poets will describe sea, when they have 
 got to do it. I am rather proud of the short sentence 
 in the 'Harbours of England,' describing a great 
 breaker against rock ; " One moment, a flint cave, 
 the next, a marble pillar, the next, a fading 
 cloud." But there is nothing in sea-description, de- 
 tailed, like Dickens' storm at the death of Ham, in 
 ' David Copperfield. '
 
 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 SECTION V. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : MOUNTAINS. 
 
 32. THE words which marked for us the pur- 
 pose of the clouds are followed immediately by 
 those notable ones ; "And God said, Let the 
 waters which are under the heavens be gathered 
 together into one place, and let the dry land 
 appear." We do not, perhaps, often enough 
 consider the deep signification of this sentence. 
 We are too apt to receive it as the description 
 of an event vaster only in its extent, not in its 
 nature, than the compelling of the Red Sea 
 to draw back that Israel might pass by. We 
 imagine the Deity in like manner rolling the 
 waves of the greater ocean together on an heap, 
 and setting bars and doors to them eternally. 
 But there is a far deeper meaning than this in 
 the solemn words of Genesis, and in the corres- 
 pondent verse of the Psalm, " His hands pre- 
 pared the dry land." Up to that moment the
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 7o 
 
 earth had been void; for, it had been witKout 
 form. The command that the waters should 
 be gathered, was the command that the earth 
 should be sculptured. The sea was not driven 
 to its place in suddenly restrained rebellion, but 
 withdrawn to its place in perfect and patient 
 obedience. The dry land appeared, not in level 
 sands forsaken by the surges, which those 
 surges might again claim for their own ; but 
 in range beyond range of swelling hills and 
 iron rocks, for ever to claim kindred with the 
 firmament, and be companioned by the clouds 
 of heaven. 
 
 What space of time was in reality occupied 
 by the " day " of Genesis, is not at present 
 of any importance for us to consider. By 
 what furnaces of fire the adamant was melted, 
 and by what wheels of earthquake it was 
 torn, and by what teeth of glacier and weight 
 of sea-waves it was engraven and finished into 
 its perfect form, we may, perhaps, hereafter 
 endeavour to conjecture; but here, as in few- 
 words the work is summed by the Historian, 
 so in few broad thoughts it should be compre- 
 hended by us ; and, as we read the mighty sen-
 
 76 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 tence, " Let the dry land appear," we should try 
 to follow the finger of God as it engraved upon 
 the stone tables of the earth the letters and the 
 law of its everlasting form, as gulf by gulf the 
 channels of the deep were ploughed ; and cape 
 by cape the lines were traced with Divine fore- 
 knowledge of the shores that were to limit the 
 nations ; and chain by chain the mountain walls 
 were lengthened forth, and their foundations 
 fastened for ever; and the compass was set upon 
 the face of the depth, and the fields and the high- 
 est part of the dust of the world were made; and 
 the right hand of Christ first strewed the snow on 
 Lebanon, and smoothed the slopes of Calvary. 
 
 It is not, I repeat, always needful, in many 
 respects it is not possible, to conjecture the 
 manner or the time in which this work was 
 done ; but it is deeply necessary for all men to 
 consider the magnificence of the accomplished 
 purpose, and the depth of the wisdom and love 
 which are manifested in the ordinances of the 
 hills. For observe, in order to bring the world 
 into the form which it now bears, it was not 
 mere sculpture that was needed ; the moun- 
 tains could not stand for a day unless they
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 77 
 
 wore formed of materials altogether different 
 from those which constitute the lower hills, and 
 the surfaces of the valleys. A harder sub- 
 stance had to be prepared for every mountain 
 chain, yet not so hard but that it might be 
 capable of crumbling down into earth fit to 
 nourish the Alpine forest, and the Alpine 
 flower ; not so hard but that in the midst of 
 the utmost majesty of its enthroned strength 
 there should be seen on it the seal of death, and 
 the writing of the same sentence that had gone 
 forth against the human frame, " Dust thou art, 
 and unto dust shalt thou return." And with 
 this perishable substance the most majestic 
 forms were to be framed that were consistent 
 with the safety of man ; and the peak was to be 
 lifted and the cliff rent, as high and as steeply 
 as was possible, in order yet to permit the 
 shepherd to feed his flocks upon the slopes, and 
 the cottage to nestle beneath their shadow. 
 And observe, two distinct ends were to be 
 accomplished in doing this. It was indeed ab- 
 solutely necessary that such eminences should 
 be created, in order to fit the earth in any wise 
 for human habitation, for without mountains
 
 78 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 the air could not be purified, nor the flowing 
 of the rivers sustained, and the earth must 
 have become for the most part plain, or stag- 
 nant marsh. But the feeding of the rivers and 
 the purifying of the winds, are the least of the 
 services appointed to the hills. To fill the thirst 
 of the human heart for the beauty of God's 
 working to startle its lethargy with the deep 
 and pure agitation of astonishment, are their 
 higher missions. They are as a great and noble 
 architecture, first giving shelter, comfort, and 
 rest ; and covered also with mighty sculpture 
 and painted legend. It is impossible to exa- 
 mine in their connected system, the features 
 of even the most ordinary mountain scenery, 
 without concluding that it has been prepared 
 in order to unite as far as possible, and in the 
 closest compass, every means of delighting and 
 sanctifying the heart of man, "as far as pos- 
 sible ;" that is, as far as is consistent with the 
 fulfilment of the sentence of condemnation on 
 the whole earth. Death must be upon the hills; 
 and the cruelty of the tempests smite them, and 
 the briar and thorn spring up upon them ; but 
 they so smite as to bring their rocks into the
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 79 
 
 fairest forms, and so spring as to make the very 
 desert blossom as the rose. Even among our 
 own hills of Scotland and Cumberland, though 
 often too barren to be perfectly beautiful, and 
 always too low to be perfectly sublime, it is 
 strange how many deep sources of delight are 
 gathered into the compass of their glens and 
 vales; and how, down to the most secret cluster 
 of their far-away flowers, and the idlest leap 
 of their straying streamlets, the whole heart of 
 nature seems thirsting to give, and still to give, 
 shedding forth her everlasting beneficence 
 with a profusion so patient, so passionate, 
 that our utmost observance and thankfulness 
 are but, at last, neglects of her nobleness, 
 and apathy to her love. But among the true 
 mountains of the greater orders, the Divine 
 purpose of appeal at once to all the faculties of 
 the human spirit becomes still more manifest. 
 Inferior hills ordinarily interrupt, in some 
 degree, the richness of the valleys at their 
 feet; the grey downs of southern England 
 and treeless coteaux of Central France, and 
 grey swells of Scottish moor, whatever peculiar 
 charm they may possess in themselves, are at
 
 80 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 least destitute of those which belong to the 
 woods and fields of the lowlands. But the great 
 mountains lift the lowlands on their sides. 
 Let the reader imagine first the appearance 
 of the most varied plain of some richly culti- 
 vated country ; let him imagine it dark with 
 graceful woods, and soft with deepest pastures ; 
 let him fill the space of it, to the utmost hori- 
 zon, with innumerable and changeful incidents 
 of scenery and life ; leading pleasant stream- 
 lets through its meadows, strewing clusters 
 of cottages beside their banks, tracing sweet 
 footpaths through its avenues, and animating 
 its fields with happy flocks, and slow wandering 
 spots of cattle ; and when he has wearied him- 
 self with endless imagining, and left no space 
 without some loveliness of its own, let him 
 conceive all this great plain, with its infinite 
 treasures of natural beauty, and happy human 
 life, gathered up in God's hands from one edge 
 of the horizon to the other, like a woven gar- 
 ment, and shaken into deep falling folds, as the 
 robes droop from a king's shoulders ; all its 
 bright rivers leaping into cataracts along the 
 hollows of its fall, and all its forests rearing
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 81 
 
 themselves aslant against its slopes, as a rider 
 rears himself back when his horse plunges, and 
 all its villages nestling themselves into the new 
 windings of its- glens, and all its pastures thrown 
 into steep waves of greensward, dashed with 
 dew along the edges of their folds, and sweeping 
 down into endless slopes, with a cloud here and 
 there lying quietly, half on the grass, half in the 
 air, and he will have as yet in all this lifted 
 world, only the foundation of one of the great 
 Alps. And whatever is lovely in the lowland 
 scenery, becomes lovelier in this change ; the 
 trees which grew heavily and stiffly from the 
 level line of plain, assume strange curves of 
 strength and grace as they bend themselves 
 against the mountain side ; they breathe more 
 freely and toss their branches more carelessly 
 as each climbs higher, looking to the clear light 
 above the topmost leaves of its brother tree ; 
 the flowers which on the arable plains fall be- 
 fore the plough, now find out for themselves 
 unapproachable places, where year by year 
 they gather into happier fellowship, and fear 
 no evil ; and the streams which in the level 
 land crept in dark eddies by unwholesome 
 
 6
 
 82 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 banks, now move in showers of silver, and are 
 clothed with rainbows, and bring health and 
 life wherever the glance of their waves can 
 reach. . . . 
 
 It may not, therefore, be altogether profitless 
 or unnecessary to review briefly the nature of 
 the three great offices which mountain ranges 
 are appointed to fulfil, in order to preserve the 
 health and increase the happiness of mankind. 
 Their first use is, of course, to give motion to 
 water. Every fountain and river, from the 
 inch-deep streamlet that crosses the village lane 
 in trembling clearness, to the massy and silent 
 march of the everlasting multitude of waters in 
 Amazon or Ganges, owe their play, and purity, 
 and power, to the ordained elevations of the 
 earth. Gentle or steep, extended or abrupt, 
 some determined slope of the earth's surface is 
 of course necessary before any wave can so 
 much as overtake one sedge in its pilgrimage ; 
 and how seldom do we enough consider, as we 
 walk beside the margins of our pleasant brooks, 
 how beautiful and wonderful is that ordinance, 
 of which every blade of grass that waves in their 
 clear waters is a perpetual sign that the dew
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : MOUNTAINS. 83 
 
 and rain fallen on the face of the earth shall 
 find no resting place ; shall find, on the con- 
 trary, fixed channels traced for them from the 
 ravines of the central crests down which they 
 roar, in sudden ranks of foam, to the dark 
 hollows beneath the banks of lowland pasture, 
 round which they must circle slowly among the 
 stems and beneath the leaves of the lilies ; paths 
 prepared for them by which, at some appointed 
 rate of journey, they must evermore descend, 
 sometimes slow, and sometimes swift, but never 
 pausing ; the daily portion of the earth they 
 have to glide over marked for them at each 
 successive sunrise, the place which has known 
 them knowing them no more, and the o-ate- 
 
 o * o 
 
 ways of guarding mountains opened for them 
 in cleft and chasm, none letting them in their 
 pilgrimage ; and, from afar off, the great 
 heart of the sea calling them to itself ! " Deep 
 calleth unto deep." I know not which of 
 the two is the more wonderful, that calm, gra- 
 dated, invisible slope of the champaign land, 
 which gives motion to the stream ; or that 
 passage cloven for it through the ranks of hill, 
 which, necessary for the health of the land
 
 84 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 immediately around them, would yet, unless so 
 supernaturally divided, have fatally intercepted 
 the flow of the waters from far off countries. 
 When did the great spirit of the river first 
 knock at these adamantine gates ? When did 
 the porter open to it, and cast his keys away 
 for ever, lapped in whirling sand ? I am not 
 satisfied no one should be satisfied with 
 that vague answer, The river cut its way. 
 Not so. The river found its Avay. * I do 
 not see that rivers in their own strength can 
 
 O 
 
 do much in cutting their w r ay ; they are 
 nearly as apt to choke their channels up as 
 to carve them out. Only give a river some 
 little sudden power in a valley, and see how 
 it will use it. Cut itself a bed? Not so, by 
 any means, but fill up its bed ; and look for 
 another in a wild, dissatisfied, inconsistent 
 manner, any way rather than the old one 
 will better please it; and even if it is banked 
 up and forced to keep to the old one, it will not 
 deepen, but do all it can to raise it, and leap 
 
 * I attach great importance to the remaining con- 
 tents of this passage, and have had occasion to insist 
 on them at great length in recent lectures at Oxford.
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 85 
 
 out of it. And although wherever water has 
 a steep fall it will swiftly cut itself a bed deep 
 into the rock or ground, it will not, when the 
 rock is hard, cut a wider channel than it 
 actually needs ; so that if the existing river 
 beds, through ranges of mountain, had in 
 reality been cut by the streams, they would be 
 found, wherever the rocks are hard, only in the 
 form of narrow and profound ravines, like the 
 well-known channel of the Niagara below the 
 fall ; not in that of extended valleys. And the 
 actual work of true mountain rivers, though 
 often much greater in proportion to their body 
 of water than that of the Niagara, is quite in- 
 significant when compared with the area and 
 depth of the valleys through which they flow ; 
 so that, although in many cases it appears that 
 those larger valleys have been excavated at 
 earlier periods by more powerful streams, or by 
 the existing stream in a more powerful condi- 
 tion, still the great fact remains always equally 
 plain, and equally admirable, that, whatever the 
 nature and duration of the agencies employed, 
 the earth was so shaped at first as to direct 
 the currents of its rivers in the manner most
 
 86 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 healthy and convenient for man. The valley 
 of the Rhone may have been in great part 
 excavated, in early times, by torrents a 
 thousand times larger than the Rhone ; but 
 it could not have been excavated at all, 
 unless the mountains had been thrown at 
 first into two chains, by which the torrents 
 were set to work in a given direction. And 
 it is easy to conceive how, under any less 
 beneficent dispositions of their masses of hill, 
 the continents of the earth might either have 
 been covered with enormous lakes, as parts of 
 North America actually are covered; or have 
 become wildernesses of pestiferous marsh ; or 
 lifeless plains, upon which the water would 
 have dried as it fell, leaving them for great 
 part of the year desert. Such districts do 
 exist, and exist in vastness ; the whole earth is 
 not prepared for the habitation of man ; only 
 certain small portions are prepared for him, 
 the houses, as it were, of the human race, from 
 which they are to look abroad upon the rest 
 of the world ; not to wonder or complain that 
 it is not all house, but to be grateful for the 
 kindness of the admirable building, in the house
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : MOUNTAINS. 87 
 
 itself, as compared with the rest. It would be 
 as absurd to think it an evil that all the world 
 is not fit for us to inhabit, as to think it an evil 
 that the globe is no larger than it is. As much 
 us we shall ever need is evidently assigned to 
 us for our dwelling place ; the rest, covered 
 with rolling waves or drifting sands, fretted 
 with ice or crested with fire, is set before us 
 for contemplation in an uninhabitable magni- 
 ficence. And that part which we are enabled to 
 inhabit owes its fitness for human life chiefly to 
 its mountain ranges, which, throwing the super- 
 fluous rain off as it falls, collect it in streams 
 or lakes, and guide it into given places, and in 
 given directions ; so that men can build their 
 cities in the midst of fields which they know 
 will be always fertile, and establish the lines of 
 their commerce upon streams which will not 
 fail. 
 
 Nor is this giving of motion to water to be 
 considered as confined only to the surface of 
 the earth. A no less important function of the 
 hills is in directing the flow of the fountains and 
 springs from subterranean reservoirs. There 
 is no miraculous springing up of water out of
 
 88 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 the ground at our feet ; but every fountain 
 and well is supplied from reservoir among the 
 hills, so placed as to involve some slight fall of 
 pressure enough to secure the constant flowing 
 of the stream ; and the incalculable blessing 
 of the power given to us, in most valleys, of 
 reaching by excavation some point whence the 
 water will rise to the surface of the ground in 
 perennial flow, is entirely owing to the concave 
 dispositions of the beds of clay or rock raised 
 from beneath the bosom of the valley into ranks 
 of enclosing hills. 
 
 The second great use of mountains is to 
 maintain a constant change in the currents 
 and nature of the air. Such change would, of 
 course, have been partly caused by difference 
 in soils and vegetation, even if the earth had 
 been level; but to a far less extent than it is 
 now by the chains of hills which exposing on 
 one side their masses of rock to the full heat of 
 the sun (increased by the angle at which the 
 rays strike on the slope), and on the other 
 casting a soft shadow for leagues over the 
 plains at their feet divide the earth not only 
 into districts, but into climates ; and cause per- 

 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 89 
 
 petual currents of air to traverse their passes in 
 a thousand different states ; moistening it with 
 the spray of their waterfalls, sucking it down 
 and beating it hither and thither in the pools of 
 their torrents, closing it within clefts and caves, 
 where the sunbeams never reach, till it is as 
 cold as November mists ; then sending it forth 
 again to breathe lightly across the slopes of 
 velvet fields, or to be scorched among sunburnt 
 shales and grassless crags ; then drawing it back 
 in moaning swirls through clefts of ice, and 
 up into dewy wreaths above the snow-fields ; 
 then piercing it with strange electric darts and 
 flashes of mountain fire, and tossing it high 
 in fantastic storm-cloud, as the dried grass is 
 tossed by the mower, only suffering it to depart 
 at last, when chastened and pure, to refresh the 
 faded air of the far off plains. 
 
 The third great use of mountains is to cause 
 perpetual change in the sails of the earth. 
 Without such provision the ground under cul- 
 tivation would in a series of years become 
 exhausted, and require to be upturned labo- 
 riously by the hand of man. But the elevations 
 of the earth's surface provide for it a perpetual
 
 90 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 renovation. The higher mountains suffer their 
 summits to be broken into fragments, and to 
 be cast down in sheets of massy rock, full, 
 as we shall see presently, of every substance 
 necessary for the nourishment of plants ; these 
 fallen fragments are again broken by frost, and 
 ground by torrents, into various conditions of 
 sand and clay materials which are distributed 
 perpetually by the streams farther and farther 
 from the mountain's base. Every shower that 
 swells the rivulets enables their waters to carry 
 certain portions of earth into new positions, and 
 exposes new banks of ground to be mined in 
 their turn. That turbid foaming of the angry 
 water, that tearing down of bank and rock 
 along the flanks of its fury, are no disturb- 
 ances of the kind course of nature ; they are 
 beneficent operations of laws necessary to the 
 existence of man, and to the beauty of the 
 earth. The process is continued more gently, 
 but not less effectively, over all the surface of 
 the lower undulating, country ; and each filtering 
 thread of summer rain which trickles through 
 the short turf of the uplands is bearing its own 
 appointed burden of earth to be thrown down
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 91 
 
 on some new natural garden in the dingles 
 beneath. 
 
 I have not spoken of the local and pecu- 
 liar utilities of mountains. I do not count 
 the benefit of the supply of summer streams 
 from the moors of the higher ranges, of the 
 various medicinal plants which are nested 
 among their rocks, of the delicate pasturage 
 which they furnish for cattle, of the forests 
 in which they bear timber for shipping, the 
 stones they supply for building, or the ores of 
 metal which they collect into spots open to 
 discovery, and easy for working. All these 
 benefits are of a secondary or a limited nature. 
 But the three great functions which I have 
 just described, those of giving motion and 
 change to water, air, and earth, are indispen- 
 sable to human existence ; they are operations 
 to be regarded with as full a depth of gratitude 
 as the laws which bid the tree bear fruit, or 
 the seed multiply itself in the earth. And thus 
 those desolate and threatening ranges of dark 
 mountain, which in nearly all ages of the world 
 men have looked upon with aversion, or with 
 terror, and shrunk back from as if they were
 
 92 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 haunted by perpetual images of death, are in 
 reality sources of life and happiness far fuller 
 and more beneficent than all the bright fruit- 
 fulness of the plain. The valleys only feed ; the 
 mountains feed, and guard, and strengthen us. 
 We take our idea of fearlessness and sublimity 
 alternately from the mountains and the sea ; 
 but we associate them unjustly. The sea-wave, 
 with all its beneficence, is yet devouring 
 and terrible ; but the silent wave of the blue 
 mountain is lifted towards heaven in a stillness 
 of perpetual mercy ; and the one surge, un- 
 fathomable in its darkness, the other unshaken 
 in its faithfulness, for ever bear the seal of their 
 appointed symbolism : 
 
 "Thy righteousness is like the great moun- 
 tains ; 
 
 " Thy judgments are a great deep." 
 
 33. Mountains are to the rest of the body of 
 the earth, what violent muscular action is to 
 the body of man. The muscles and tendons of 
 its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out 
 with force and convulsive energy, full of 
 expression, passion, and strength ; the plains
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : MOUNTAINS. 93 
 
 and the lower hills are the repose and the 
 effortless motion of the frame, when its muscles 
 lie dormant and concealed beneath the lines 
 of its beauty, yet ruling those lines in their 
 every undulation. This then is the first grand 
 principle of the truth of the earth. The spirit 
 of the hills is action, that of the lowlands 
 repose ; and between these there is to be found 
 every variety of motion and of rest, from the 
 inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, 
 with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks, Avhich 
 with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with 
 the clouds drifting like hair from their bright 
 foreheads, lift up their Titan heads to Heaven, 
 saying, " I live for ever." 
 
 34. "Where they are,* they seem to form the 
 world ; no mere bank of a river here, or of 
 a lane there, peeping out among the hedges 
 or forests, but from the lowest valley to 
 
 * Passage written after I had got by some years 
 cooler and wiser than when I wrote No. 33, describing 
 however the undulation of the gneiss rocks, which, 
 'where they are, seem to form the world,' in terms 
 more fanciful than I now like.
 
 94 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 the highest clouds, all is theirs, one ada- 
 mantine dominion and rigid authority of rock. 
 We yield ourselves to the impression of 
 their eternal unconquerable stubbornness of 
 strength ; their mass seems the least yielding, 
 least to be softened, or in anywise dealt with by 
 external force, of all earthly substance. And 
 behold, as we look further into it, it is all 
 touched and troubled, like waves by a summer 
 breeze ; rippled far more delicately than seas or 
 lakes are rippled ; they only undulate along 
 their surfaces this rock trembles through its 
 every fibre, like the chords of an Eolian harp, 
 like the stillest air of spring, with the echoes 
 of a child's voice. Into the heart of all those 
 great mountains, through every tossing of their 
 boundless crests, and deep beneath all their 
 unfathomable defiles, flows that strange quiver- 
 ing of their substance. Other and weaker 
 things seem to express their subjection to an 
 Infinite Power only by momentary terrors ; as 
 the weeds bow down before the feverish wind, 
 and the sound of the going in the tops of the 
 taller trees passes on before the clouds, and the 
 fitful opening of pale spaces on the dark water,
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 9> 
 
 as if some invisible Land were casting dust 
 abroad upon it, gives warning of the anger that 
 is to come, we may well imagine that there is 
 a fear passing upon the grass, and leaves, and 
 waters, at the presence of some great spirit 
 commissioned to let the tempest loose ; but the 
 terror passes, and their sweet rest is perpetually 
 restored to the pastures and the waves. Not so 
 to the mountains. They, which at first seem 
 strengthened beyond the dread of any violence 
 or change, are yet also ordained to bear upon 
 them the symbol of a perpetual fear. The 
 tremor which fades from the soft lake and 
 gliding river is sealed to all eternity upon the 
 rock ; and while things that pass visibly from 
 birth to death may sometimes forget their 
 feebleness, the mountains are made to possess 
 a perpetual memorial of their infancy that 
 infancy which the prophet saw in his vision,'' 
 " I beheld the earth, and lo, it was without 
 form, and void, and the heavens, and they had 
 
 * Utter misinterpretation of the passage. It is the 
 old age, not the childhood of earth, which Jeremiah 
 describes in this passage. See its true interpretation 
 in Tors Clavigera,' Letter 46.
 
 96 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 no light. I beheld the mountains, and lo they 
 trembled, and all the hills moved lightly." 
 
 35. The longer I stayed among the Alps, and 
 the more closely I examined them, the more I 
 was struck by the one broad fact of there being a 
 vast Alpine plateau, or mass of elevated land, 
 upon which nearly all the highest peaks stood 
 like children set upon a table, removed, in most 
 cases, far back from the edge of the plateau, 
 as if for fear of their falling ; while the most 
 majestic scenes in the Alps are produced, not so 
 much by any violation of this law, as by one 
 of the great peaks having apparently walked 
 to the edge of the table to look over, and thus 
 showing itself suddenly above the valley in its 
 full height. This is the case with the Wetter- 
 
 O 
 
 horn and Eiger at Grrindelwald, and with the 
 Grande Jorasse above the Col de Ferret. But 
 the raised bank or table is always intelligibly 
 in existence, even in these apparently exceptional 
 cases ; and for the most part, the great peaks 
 are not allowed to come to the edge of it, but 
 remain like the keeps of castles far withdrawn, 
 STirrounded, league beyond league, by compara-
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 97 
 
 lively level fields of mountain, over which the 
 lapping sheets of glacier writhe and flow, foam- 
 ing about the feet of the dark central crests like 
 the surf of an enormous sea-breaker hurled over 
 a rounded rock, and islanding some fragment of 
 it in the midst. And the result of this arrange- 
 ment is a kind of division of the whole of 
 Switzerland into an upper and lower mountain 
 world, the lower world consisting of rich 
 valleys, bordered by steep, but easily accessible, 
 wooded banks of mountain, more or less divided 
 by ravines, through which glimpses are caught 
 of the higher Alps ; the upper world, reached 
 after the first banks of 3,000 or 4,000 feet in 
 height have been surmounted, consisting of 
 comparatively level, but most desolate tracts of 
 moor and rock, half covered by glacier, and 
 stretching to the feet of the true pinnacles of 
 the chain. It can hardly be necessary to point 
 out the perfect wisdom and kindness of this 
 arrangement, as a provision for the safety of 
 the inhabitants of the high mountain regions. 
 If the great peaks rose at once from the deepest 
 valleys, every stone which was struck from 
 their pinnacles, and every snow-wreath which 
 
 7
 
 98 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 slipped from their ledges, would descend at 
 once upon the inhabitable ground, over which 
 no year would pass without recording some 
 calamity of earth-slip or avalanche ; while in 
 the course of their fall both the stones and the 
 snow would strip the woods from the hill-sides, 
 leaving only naked channels of destruction 
 where there are now the sloping meadow and 
 the chestnut glade. Besides this, the masses of 
 snow, cast down at once into the warmer air, 
 would all melt rapidly in the spring, causing 
 furious inundation of every great river for a 
 month or six weeks. The snow being then all 
 thawed, except what lay upon the highest peaks 
 in regions of nearly perpetual frost, the rivers 
 would be supplied during the summer only by 
 fountains, and the feeble tricklings on sunny 
 days from the high snows. The Rhone, under 
 such circumstances, would hardly be larger, 
 in summer, than the Severn, and many Swiss 
 valleys would be left almost without mois- 
 ture. All these calamities are prevented by 
 the peculiar Alpine structure which has been 
 described. The broken rocks and the sliding 
 snow of the high peaks, instead of being dashed
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 99 
 
 at once to the vales, are caught upon the deso- 
 late shelves, or shoulders, which everywhere 
 surround the central crests. The soft banks 
 which terminate these shelves, traversed by no 
 falling fragments, clothe themselves with richest 
 wood, while the masses of snow heaped upon 
 the ledge above them, in a climate neither so 
 warm as to thaw them quickly in the spring, 
 nor so cold as to protect them from all the 
 power of the summer sun, either form them- 
 selves into glaciers, or remain in slowly wasting 
 fields even to the close of the year, in either 
 case supplying constant, abundant, and regular 
 streams to the villages and pastures beneath, 
 and to the rest of Europe, noble and navigable 
 rivers. 
 
 Now, that such a structure is the best and 
 wisest possible,* is indeed sufficient reason 
 for its existence, and to many people it may 
 seem useless to question farther respecting its 
 origin. But I can hardly conceive any one 
 standing face to face with one of these towers 
 of central rock, and yet not also asking himself, 
 
 * Of course, I had seen every other tried before 
 giving this favourable judgment.
 
 100 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 Ts this indeed the actual first work of the 
 Divine Master, on which I gaze? Was the 
 great precipice shaped by His finger, as Adam 
 was shaped out of the dust ? Were its clefts and 
 ledges carved upon it by its Creator, as the 
 letters were on the tables of the law, and was it 
 thus left to bear its eternal testimony to His 
 beneficence among these clouds of Heaven? 
 Or is it the descendant of a long race of 
 mountains, existing under appointed laws of 
 birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? 
 There can be no doubt as to the answer. The 
 rock itself answers audibly by the murmur 
 of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It 
 is not as it was once. Those waste leagues 
 around its feet are loaded with the wrecks of 
 what it was. On these perhaps, of all moun- 
 tains, the characters of decay are written most 
 clearly ; around these are spread most gloomily 
 the memorials of their pride, and the signs of 
 their humiliation. 
 
 What then were they once ? The only answer 
 is yet again " Behold the cloud !" 
 
 36. There are- many spots among the inferior
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: MOUNTAINS. 101 
 
 ridges of the Alps, such as the Col de Ferret, 
 the Col d'Anterne, and the associated ranges of 
 the Buet, which, though commanding prospects 
 of great nobleness, are themselves very nearly 
 types of all that is most painful to the human 
 mind. Vast wastes of mountain ground,* 
 covered here and there with dull grey grass 
 or moss, but breaking continually into black 
 banks of shattered slate, all glistening and sod- 
 den with slow tricklings of clogged, incapable 
 streams ; the snow-water oozing through them 
 in a cold sweat, and spreading itself in 
 creeping stains among their dust ; ever and 
 anon a shaking here and there, and a handful 
 or two of their particles or flakes trembling 
 down, one sees not why, into more total disso- 
 lution, leaving a few jagged teeth, like the 
 edges of knives eaten away by vinegar, pro- 
 jecting, through the half dislodged mass, from 
 the inner rock; keen enough to cut the hand or 
 
 * This is a fourth volume passage, and I will 
 venture to say of it, as Albert Durer, when he was 
 pleased with his work that for what it has to do, it 
 cannot be much better done. It is a study on the 
 Col de Bon Homme.
 
 TO 2 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 foot that rests on them, yet crumbling as they 
 wound, and soon sinking again into the smooth, 
 slippery, glutinous heap ; looking like a beach 
 of black scales of dead fish cast ashore from 
 a poisonous sea, and sloping away into foul 
 ravines, branched down immeasurable slopes of 
 barrenness, where the winds howl and wander 
 continually, and the snow lies in wasted and 
 sorrowful fields covered with sooty dust, that 
 collects in streaks and stains at the bottom of 
 all its thawing ripples. 
 
 I know of no other scenes so appalling as 
 these in storm, or so woful in sunshine. 
 Where, however, these same rocks exist in 
 more favourable positions that is to say in 
 gentler banks and at lower elevations they 
 form a ground for the most luxuriant vege- 
 tation ; and the valleys of Savoy owe to them 
 some of then* loveliest solitudes exquisitely 
 rich pastures, interspersed with arable and 
 orchard land, and shaded by groves of 
 walnut and cherry. Scenes of this kind, and 
 of that just described, so singularly opposed, 
 and apparently brought together as foils to each 
 other, are however peculiar to certain beds of
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : MOUNTAINS. 103 
 
 the slaty coherents, which are both vast in ele- 
 vation, and easy of destruction. In Wales and 
 Scotland the same groups of rocks possess far 
 greater hardness, while they attain less eleva- 
 tion ; and the result is a totally different aspect 
 of scenery. The severity of the climate and 
 the comparative durableness of the rock, forbid 
 the rich vegetation ; but the exposed summits, 
 though barren, are not subject to laws of de- 
 struction so rapid and fearful as in Switzerland, 
 and the natural colour of the rock is oftener 
 developed in the purples and greys which, 
 mingled with the heather, form the principal 
 elements of the deep and beautiful distant blue 
 of the British hills. Their gentler mountain 
 streams also permit the beds of rock to remain 
 in firm, though fantastic, forms along their 
 banks, and the gradual action of the cascades 
 and eddies upon the slaty cleavage produces 
 many pieces of foreground scenery to which 
 higher hills can present no parallel. 
 
 37. Unlike Chamouni Aiguilles, there is no 
 aspect of destruction about the Matterhorn 
 cliffs. They are not torn remnants of sepa-
 
 104 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 rating spires, yielding flake by flake, and band 
 by band, to the continual process of decay. 
 They are, on the' contrary, an unaltered 
 monument^ seemingly sculptured long ago, 
 the huge walls retaining yet the forms into 
 which they were first engraven, and standing 
 like an Egyptian Temple ; delicate fronted, 
 softly coloured, the suns of uncounted ages 
 rising and falling upon it continually, but still 
 casting the same line of shadows from east to 
 west ; still, century after century, touching the 
 same purple stains on the lotus pillars ; while 
 the desert sand ebbs and flows about their feet, 
 as those autumn leaves of rock lie heaped and 
 weak about the base of the Cervim. 
 
 Is not this a strange type in the very heart 
 and height of these mysterious Alps these 
 wrinkled hills in their snowy, cold, grey-haired 
 old age, at first so silent, then, as we keep quiet 
 at their feet, muttering and whispering to us 
 garrulously in broken and dreaming fits, as it 
 were, about their childhood, is it not a strange 
 type of the things which " Out of weakness 
 are made strong ? '' If one of these little flakes 
 of mica sand, hurried in tremulous spangling
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : MOUNTAINS. 105 
 
 along the bottom of the ancient river, too light 
 to sink, too faint to float, almost too small 
 for sight, could have had a mind given to it 
 as it was at last borne down with its kindred 
 dust into the abysses of the stream, and laid, 
 (might it not have been thought?) for a 
 hopeless eternity, in the dark ooze, the most 
 despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth's 
 atoms ; incapable of any use or change ; not 
 fit, down there in the diluvial darkness, so 
 much as to help an earth wasp to build its nest, 
 or feed the first fibre of a lichen ; what 
 would it have thought, had it been told that 
 one day, knitted into a strength as of im- 
 perishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible 
 by the flame, out of the substance of it, with 
 its fellows, the axe of God should hew that 
 Alpine tower? that against it poor, helpless 
 mica flake ! the wild north winds should rage 
 in vain ; beneath it low-fallen mica flake ! 
 the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks 
 of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade 
 away in unregarded blue ; and around it 
 weak, wave-drifted mica flake ! the great war 
 of the firmament should burst in thunder,
 
 106 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 and yet stir it not ; and the fiery arrows and 
 angry meteors of the night fall blunted back 
 from it into the air ; and all the stars in the 
 clear heaven should light, one by one as they 
 rose, new cressets upon the points of snow 
 that fringed its abiding-place on the imperish- 
 able spire?
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : STONES. 107 
 
 SECTION VI. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: STONES. 
 
 38. THERE are no natural objects out of which 
 more can be learned than out of stones. They 
 seem to have been created especially to reward 
 a patient observer. Nearly all other objects in 
 nature can be seen to some extent without 
 patience, and are pleasant even in being half 
 seen. Trees, clouds, and rivers, are enjoyable 
 even by the careless ; but the stone under his 
 foot has, for carelessness, nothing in it but 
 stumbling ; no pleasure is languidly to be had 
 out of it, nor food, nor good of any kind ; 
 nothing but symbolism of the hard heart, and 
 the unfatherly gift. And yet, do but give it 
 some reverence and watchfulness, and there is 
 bread of thought in it, more than in any other 
 lowly feature of all the landscape. For a stone, 
 when it is examined, will be found a mountain in 
 miniature. The fineness of Nature's work is so
 
 108 FEONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 great that into a single block, a foot or two in 
 diameter, she can compress as many changes 
 of form and structure, on a small scale, as she 
 needs for her mountains on a large one ; and 
 taking moss for forests, and grains of crystal 
 for crags, the surface of a stone in by far the 
 plurality of instances is more interesting than 
 the surface of an ordinary hill ; more fantastic 
 in form, and incomparably richer in colour. 
 
 39. On a Highland hill-side are multitudinous 
 clusters of fern and heather ; on an Alpine one, 
 multitudinous groves of chestnut and pine. 
 The number of the things may be the same, but 
 the sense of infinity is in the latter case far 
 greater, because the number is of nobler things. 
 Indeed, so far as mere magnitude of space 
 occupied on the field of the horizon is the 
 measure of objects, a bank of earth ten feet high 
 may, if we stoop to the foot of it, be made to 
 occupy just as much of the sky as that bank of 
 mountain at Villeneuve ; nay, in many respects, 
 its little ravines and escarpments, watched witH 
 some help of imagination, may become very 
 sufficiently representative to us of those of the
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: STONES. 109 
 
 great mountain ; and in classing all water-worn 
 mountain ground under the general and humble 
 term of Banks, I mean to imply this relation- 
 ship of structure between the smallest eminences 
 and the highest. But in this matter of super- 
 imposed quantity, the distinctions of rank are at 
 once fixed. The heap of earth bears its few tufts 
 of moss, or knots of grass ; the Highland or 
 Cumberland mountain, its honeyed heathers 
 or scented ferns ; but the mass of the bank 
 at Martigny or Villeneuve has a vineyard in 
 every cranny of its rocks, and a chestnut grove 
 on every crest of them .... The minute 
 mounds and furrows scattered up the side of 
 that great promontory, when they are actually 
 approached, after three or four hours climbing, 
 turn into independent hills, with true parks of 
 lovely pasture land enclosed among them, and 
 avenue after avenue of chestnuts, walnuts, and 
 pines, bending round their bases, while in the 
 deeper dingles, populous villages, literally bound 
 down to the rock by enormous trunks of vine, 
 which, first trained lightly over the loose stone 
 roofs, have in process of years cast their fruit- 
 ful net over the w r hole village, and fastened it to
 
 110 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 the ground under their purple weight and way- 
 ward coils as securely as ever human heart was 
 fastened to earth by the net of the Flatterer. 
 
 40. When a rock of any kind has lain for some 
 time exposed to the weather, Nature finishes 
 it in her own way. First she takes wonderful 
 pains about its forms, sculpturing it into ex- 
 quisite variety of dent and dimple, and rounding 
 or hollowing it into contours, which for fineness 
 no human hand can follow ; then she colours 
 it ; and every one of her touches of colour, 
 instead of being a powder mixed with oil, is 
 a minute forest of living trees, glorious in 
 strength and beauty, and concealing wonders 
 of structure. 
 
 41. On the broken rocks of the foreground in 
 the crystalline groups, the mosses seem to set 
 themselves consentfully and deliberately to the 
 task of producing the most exquisite harmonies 
 of colour in their power. They will not conceal 
 the form of the rock, but will gather over it in 
 little brown bosses, like small cushions of velvet, 
 made of mixed threads of dark ruby silk and
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : STONES. Ill 
 
 gold, rounded over more subdued films of white 
 and grey, with lightly crisped and curled edges 
 like hoar frost on fallen leaves, and minute 
 clusters of upright orange stalks with pointed 
 caps, and fibres of deep green, and gold, and faint 
 purple passing into black, all woven together, 
 and following with unimaginable fineness of 
 gentle growth the undulation of the stone they 
 cherish, until it is charged with colour so that 
 it can receive no more ; and instead of looking 
 rugged or cold, or stern, as anything that a rock 
 is held to be at heart, it seems to be clothed 
 with a soft dark leopard's skin, embroidered 
 with arabesque of purple and silver. 
 
 42. The colour of the white varieties of marble 
 is of exquisite delicacy, owing to the partial 
 translucency of the pure rock ; and it has 
 always appeared to me a most wonderful ordi- 
 nance one of the most marked pieces of pur- 
 pose in the creation that all the variegated 
 kinds should be comparatively opaque, so as 
 to set off the colour on the surface, while the 
 white which, if it had been opaque, would 
 have looked somewhat coarse, (as for instance
 
 112 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 common chalk does), is rendered just translu- 
 cent enough to give an impression of extreme 
 purity, but not so translucent as to interfere 
 in the least with the distinctness of any forms 
 into which it is wrought. The colours of 
 variegated marbles are also for the most part 
 very beautiful, especially those composed of 
 purple, amber, and green, with white ; and 
 there seems something notably attractive to 
 the human mind in the vague and veined 
 labyrinths of their arrangements. 
 
 43. I have often had occasion to allude to the 
 apparent connection of brilliancy of colour with 
 vigour of life or purity of substance. This is 
 pre-eminently the case in the mineral kingdom. 
 The perfection with which the particles of any 
 substance unite in crystallization, corresponds 
 in that kingdom to the vital power in organic 
 nature ; and it is a universal law, that according 
 to the purity of any substance, and according 
 to the energy of its crystallization, is its beauty 
 or brightness. Pure earths are white when 
 in powder; and the same earths, which are 
 the constituents of clay and sand, form,
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: STONES. 113 
 
 when crystallized, the emerald, ruby, sapphire, 
 amethyst, and opal. 
 
 44. As we pass between the hills which have 
 been shaken by earthquake and torn by con- 
 vulsion, we find that periods of perfect repose 
 succeed those of destruction. The pools of calm 
 water lie clear beneath their fallen rocks, the 
 water-lilies gleam, and the reeds whisper among 
 their shadows ; the village rises again over the 
 forgotten graves, and its church tower, white 
 through the storm-light, proclaims a renewed 
 appeal to His protection in whose hand "are 
 all the corners of the earth, and the strength of 
 the hills is his also." There is no loveliness 
 of Alpine valley that does not teach the same 
 lesson. It is just where " the mountain falling 
 cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out 
 of his place," that in process of years the 
 fairest meadows bloom between the fragments, 
 the clearest rivulets murmur from between their 
 crevices among the flowers, and the clustered 
 c.ottages, each sheltered beneath some strength 
 of mossy stone, now to be removed no more, 
 and with their pastured flocks around them, 
 
 8
 
 114 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 safe from the eagle's stoop and the wolfs 
 ravin, have written upon their fronts, in simple 
 words, the mountaineer's faith in the ancient 
 promise, " Neither shalt thou be afraid of 
 destruction, when it cometh ; for thou shalt be 
 in league with the stones of the field, and the 
 beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee."
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 115 
 
 SECTION VII. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 
 
 45. WONDERFUL, in universal adaptation to 
 man's need, desire, and discipline ; God's daily 
 preparation of the earth for him, with beautiful 
 means of life. First, a carpet, to make it soft 
 for him ; then a coloured fantasy of embroidery 
 thereon ; then, tall spreading of foliage to shade 
 him from sun-heat, and shade also the fallen 
 rain, that it may not dry quickly back into the 
 clouds, but stay to nourish the springs among 
 the moss. Stout wood to bear this leafage ; 
 easily to be cut, yet tough and light, to make 
 houses for him, or instruments, (lance-shaft, 
 or plough handle, according to his temper) ; 
 useless it had been if harder ; useless if less 
 fibrous ; useless if less elastic. Winter comes, 
 and the shade of leafage falls away, to let the 
 sun warm the earth ; the strong boughs re- 
 main, breaking the strength of winter winds.
 
 11G FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 The seeds -which are to prolong the race, 
 innumerable according to the need, are 
 made beautiful and palatable, varied into 
 infinitude of appeal to the fancy of man, or 
 provision for his service ; cold juice, or flowing 
 spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, pre- 
 serving resin, medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or 
 lulling charm ; and all these presented in forms 
 of endless change. Fragility or force, softness 
 and strength, in all degrees and aspects ; un- 
 erring uprightness, as of temple pillars, or 
 unguided wandering of feeble tendrils on the 
 ground ; mighty resistances of rigid arm and 
 limb to the storms of ages, or wavings to and 
 fro with faintest pulse of summer streamlet ; 
 roots cleaving the strength of rock, or binding 
 the transience of the sand ; crests basking in 
 sunshine of the desert, or hiding by dripping 
 spring and lightless cave ; foliage far tossing 
 in entangled fields beneath every wave of 
 ocean clothing with variegated, everlasting 
 films the peaks of the trackless mountains, 
 or ministering, at cottage doors, to every 
 gentlest passion and simplest joy of humanity.
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 117 
 
 46. If ever in autumn a pensiveness falls upon 
 us, as the leaves drift by in their fading, may 
 we not wisely look up in hope to their mighty 
 monuments? Behold how fair, how far pro- 
 longed in arch and aisle, the avenues of the 
 valleys, the fringes of the hills ! so stately, 
 so eternal ; the joy of man, the comfort of all 
 living creatures, the glory of the earth, they 
 are but the monuments of those poor leaves 
 that flit faintly past us to die. Let them not 
 pass, without our understanding their last 
 counsel and example : that we also, careless 
 of monument by the grave, may build it in 
 the world monument by which men may be 
 taught to remember, not where we died, but 
 where we lived. 
 
 47. The Pine magnificent! nay, sometimes 
 almost terrible. Other trees, tufting crag or 
 hill, yield to the form and sway of the ground, 
 clothe it with soft compliance, are partly its 
 subjects, partly its flatterers, partly its com- 
 forters. But the pine rises in serene resist- 
 ance, self-contained ; nor can I ever without 
 awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff, far
 
 118 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 from all Louse or work of men, looking up to 
 its companies of pines, as they stand on the 
 inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of the 
 enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like 
 the shadow of the one beside it upright, 
 fixed, spectral, as troops of ghosts standing 
 on the walls of Hades, not knowing each other, 
 
 J O ' 
 
 dumb for ever. You cannot reach them, 
 cannot cry to them : those trees never heard 
 human voice ; they are far above all sound 
 but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen 
 leaf of theirs : all comfortless they stand, 
 between the two eternities of the Vacancy 
 and the Rock ; yet with such iron will, that 
 the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside 
 them, fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to 
 their dark energy of delicate life, and mono- 
 tony of enchanted pride unnumbered, uncon- 
 querable. 
 
 Then note farther their perfectness. The 
 impression on most people's minds must 
 have been received more from pictures than 
 reality, so far as I can judge, so ragged they 
 think the pine ; whereas its chief character in 
 health is green and full roundness. It stands
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 119 
 
 compact, like one of its own cones, slightly 
 curved on its sides, finished and quaint as a 
 carved tree in some Elizabethan garden ; and 
 instead of being wild in expression, forms the 
 softest of all forest scenery, for other trees show 
 their trunks and twisting boughs ; but the pine, 
 growing either in luxuriant mass, or in happy 
 isolation, allows no branch to be seen. Summit 
 behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or 
 down to the very grass sweep the circlets of its 
 boughs ; so that there is nothing but green 
 cone, and green carpet. Nor is it only softer, 
 but in one sense more cheerful than other 
 foliage, for it casts only a pyramidal shadow. 
 Lowland forest arches over head, and chequers 
 the ground with darkness ; but the pine, grow- 
 ing in scattered groups, leaves the glades be- 
 tween emerald bright. Its gloom is ah 1 its 
 own ; narrowing into the sky, it lets the sun- 
 shine strike down to the dew. And if ever a 
 superstitious feeling comes over me among the 
 pine glades, it is never tainted with the old 
 German forest fear, but it is only a more 
 solemn tone of the fairy enchantment that 
 haunts our English meadows ; so that I have
 
 ]20 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 always called the prettiest pine-glade in Cha- 
 mouni, " Fairies' Hollow." It is in the glen 
 beneath the steep ascent above Pont Pelissier, 
 and may be reached by a little winding path 
 which goes down from the top of the hill * 
 being indeed not truly a glen, but a broad 
 ledge of moss and turf, leaning in a formidable 
 precipice (which, however, the gentle branches 
 hide) over the Arve. An almost isolated rock 
 promontory, many coloured, rises at the end of 
 it. On the other sides it is bordered by cliffs, 
 from which a little cascade falls, literally, down 
 among the pines, for it is so light, shaking itself 
 into mere showers of seed pearl in the sun, that 
 the pines don't know it from mist, and grow 
 through it without minding. Underneath, there 
 is only the mossy silence, and above, for ever, 
 the snow of the nameless Aiguille. 
 
 Other trees rise against the sky in dots and 
 knots, but this, in fringes. You never see the 
 edges of it, so subtle are they ; and for this 
 
 * The new road to Chamouni has been carried right 
 through it. A cascade on the right, as you ascend, 
 marks the place spoken of in the text, once as lonely 
 as Corrie-nan-shian.
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 121 
 
 reason, it alone of trees, so far as I know, is 
 capable of the fiery change, which has been 
 noticed by Shakspeare. When the sun rises 
 behind a ridge crested with pine, provided 
 the ridge be at a distance of about two miles, 
 and seen clear, all the trees, for about three 
 or four degrees on each side of the sun, be- 
 come trees of light, seen in clear flame against 
 the darker sky, and dazzling as the sun itself. 
 I thought at first this was owing to the actual 
 lustre of the leaves ; but I believe now it is 
 caused by the cloud-dew upon them every 
 minutest leaf carrying its diamond. It seems 
 as if these trees, living always among the 
 clouds, had caught part of their glory from 
 them ; and themselves, the darkest of vegeta- 
 tion, could yet add splendour to the sun itself. 
 
 48. The Swiss have certainly no feelings re- 
 specting their mountains in anywise corre- 
 spondent with ours. It was rather as fortresses 
 of defence, than as spectacles of splendour, that 
 the cliffs of the Rothslock bare rule over the 
 destinies of those who dwelt at their feet ; and 
 the training for which the mountain children
 
 122 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 had to thank the slopes of the Muotta-Thal, 
 was in soundness of breath, and steadiness of 
 limb, far more than in elevation of idea. But 
 the point which I desire the reader to note is, 
 that the character of the scene which, if any, 
 appears to have been impressive to the inhabi- 
 tant, is not that which we ourselves feel when 
 we enter the district. It was not from their 
 lakes, nor their cliffs, nor their glaciers though 
 these were all peculiarly their possession that 
 the three venerable cantons received their 
 name. They were not called the States of the 
 Rock, nor the States of the Lake, but the 
 States of the Forest. And the one of the 
 three which contains the most touching record 
 of the spiritual power of Swiss religion, in 
 the name of the convent of the " Hill of 
 Angels," has, for its own, none but the sweet 
 childish name of " Under the Woods." 
 
 And indeed you may pass under them if, 
 leaving the most sacred spot in Swiss history, 
 the Meadow of the Three Fountains, you bid 
 the boatman row southward a little way by 
 the shore of the Bay of Uri. Steepest there 
 on its western side, the walls of its rocks
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 123 
 
 ascend to heaven. Far in the blue of even- 
 ing, like a great cathedral pavement, lies the 
 lake in its darkness; and you may hear the 
 whisper of innumerable falling waters return 
 from the hollows of the cliff, like the voices 
 of a multitude praying under their breath. 
 From time to time the beat of a wave, slow 
 lifted where the rocks lean over the black 
 depth, dies heavily as the last note of a re- 
 quiem. Opposite, green with steep grass, and 
 set with chalet villages, the Fron-Alp rises in 
 one solemn glow of pastoral light and peace ; 
 and above, against the clouds of twilight, 
 ghostly on the gray precipice, stand, myriad 
 by myriad, the shadowy armies of the Unter- 
 walden pine. 
 
 49. It had been wild weather when I left 
 Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds 
 were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap 
 of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun 
 along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up the 
 infinity of its arches, like the bridge of Chaos. 
 But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban 
 Mount the storm swept finally to the north,
 
 124 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 and the noble outline of the domes of Albano, 
 and graceful darkness of its ilex grove, rose 
 against pure streaks of alternate blue and 
 amber, the upper sky gradually flushing through 
 the last fragments of rain-cloud in deep pal- 
 pitating azure, half asther and half dew. The 
 noonday sun came slanting down the rocky 
 slopes of La Biccia, and their masses of en- 
 tangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints 
 were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand 
 evergreens, were penetrated with it, as with 
 rain. I cannot call it colour, it was conflagra- 
 
 7 O 
 
 tion. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the 
 curtains of God's Tabernacle, the rejoicing trees 
 sank into the valley in showers of light, every 
 separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burn- 
 ing life; each, as it turned to reflect, or to 
 transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then 
 an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the 
 valley the green vistas arched like the hollows 
 of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with 
 the arbutus flowers dashed along their banks 
 
 O 
 
 for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray 
 tossed into the air round them, breaking over 
 the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 125 
 
 stars, fading and kindling alternately as the 
 weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every 
 glade of grass burned like the golden floor of 
 heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage 
 broke, and closed above it, as sheet-lightning 
 opens in a cloud at sun-set ; the motionless 
 masses of dark rock, dark though flushed 
 with scarlet lichen, casting their quiet shadows 
 across its restless radiance, the fountain under- 
 neath them filling its marble hollow with blue 
 mist and fitful sound and, over all, the mul- 
 titudinous bars of amber and rose the sacred 
 clouds that have no darkness, and only exist 
 to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals 
 between the solemn and orbed repose of the 
 stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the 
 last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless 
 line where the Campagna melted into the blaze 
 of the sea. 
 
 50. Flowers seem intended for the solace of 
 ordinary humanity : children love them ; quiet, 
 contented, ordinary people love them as they 
 grow ; luxurious and disorderly people rejoice 
 in them gathered ; they are the cottager's
 
 126 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 treasure ; and in the crowded town, mark, as 
 with a little broken fragment of rainbow, the 
 windows of the workers in whose hearts rests 
 the covenant of peace. 
 
 51. Yet few people really care about flowers. 
 Many, indeed, are fond of finding a new shape 
 of blossom, caring for it as a child cares about 
 a. kaleidoscope. Many, also, like a fair service 
 of flowers in the greenhouse, as a fair service 
 of plate on the table. Many are scientifically 
 interested in them, though even these in the 
 nomenclature, rather than the flowers ; and 
 
 a few enjoy their gardens But, the 
 
 blossoming time of the year being princi- 
 pally spring, I perceive it to be the mind 
 of most people, during that period, to stay in 
 towns. A year or two ago a keen-sighted and 
 eccentrically-minded friend of mine, having 
 taken it into his head to violate this national 
 custom, and go to the Tyrol in spring, was 
 passing through a valley near Landech with 
 several similarly head-strong companions. A 
 strange mountain appeared in the distance, 
 belted about its breast with a zone of blue, like
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE : PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 127 
 
 our English Queen. Was it a blue cloud, a 
 blue horizontal bar of the air that Titian 
 breathed in youth, seen now far away, which 
 mortal might never breathe again ? Was it a 
 mirage a meteor? Would it stay to be ap- 
 proached? (ten miles of winding road yet 
 between them and the foot of this mountain) 
 such questioning had they concerning it. 
 My keen-sighted friend, alone, maintained it to 
 be substantial ; whatever it might be, it was 
 not air, and would not vanish. The ten miles 
 of road were overpassed, the carriage left, the 
 mountain climbed. It stayed patiently, ex- 
 panding still into richer breath and heavenlier 
 glow a belt of gentians. Such things may 
 verily be seen among the Alps in spring, and 
 in spring only, which being so, I observe most 
 people prefer going in autumn. 
 
 52. Perhaps few people have ever asked them- 
 selves why they admire a rose so much more 
 than all other flowers. If they consider, they 
 will find, first, that red is, in a delicately gra- 
 dated state, the loveliest of all pure colours ; 
 and secondly, that in the rose there is no
 
 128 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 shadow, except what is composed of colour. All 
 its shadows are fuller in colour than its lights, 
 owing to the translucency and reflective power 
 of the leaves. 
 
 53. Has the reader ever considered the 
 relations of commonest forms of volatile sub- 
 stance? The invisible particles which cause 
 the scent of a rose-leaf, how minute, how mul- 
 titudinous, passing richly away into the air 
 continually ! 
 
 54. In the range of inorganic nature I doubt 
 if any object can be found more perfectly beau- 
 tiful, than a fresh, deep snow-drift, seen under 
 warm light. Its curves are of inconceivable 
 perfection and changefulness ; its surface and 
 transparency alike exquisite ; its light and 
 shade of inexhaustible variety and inimitable 
 finish, the shadows sharp, pale, and of- hea- 
 venly colour, the reflected lights intense and 
 multitudinous, and mingled with the sweet 
 
 occurrences of transmitted light 
 
 If, passing to the edge of a sheet of it upon the 
 lower Alps, early in May, we find, as we are
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 129 
 
 nearly sure to find, two or three little round 
 openings pierced in it ; and through these, 
 emergent, a slender, pensive, fragile flower,* 
 whose small, dark, purple-fringed bell hangs 
 down and shudders over the icy cleft that it has 
 cloven, as if partly wondering at its own recent 
 grave, and partly dying of very fatigue after 
 its hard-won victory ; we shall be, or we ought 
 to be, moved by a totally different impression 
 of loveliness from that which we receive among 
 the dead ice and the idle clouds : there is now 
 uttered to us a call for sympathy, now offered 
 to us an image of moral purpose and achieve- 
 ment, which, however unconscious or senseless 
 the creature may indeed be that so seems to 
 call, cannot be heard without affection, nor con- 
 templated without worship, by any of us whose 
 heart is rightly turned or whose mind is clearly 
 and surely sighted. 
 
 * Soldanella Alpina. I think it is the only Alpine 
 flower which actually pierces snow, though I have 
 seen gentians filling thawed hoof-prints. Crocuses 
 are languid till they have had sun for a day or two. 
 But the soldanella enjoys its snow, at first, and after- 
 wards its fields. I have seen it make a pasture look 
 like a large lilac silk gown. 
 
 9
 
 130 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 55. It has been well shown by Dr. Herbert. 
 that many plants are found alone on a certain 
 soil or sub-soil in a wild state, not because such 
 soil is favourable to them, but because they 
 alone are capable of existing on it, and because 
 all dangerous rivals are by its inhospitality re- 
 moved. Now if we withdraw the plant from 
 this position, which it hardly endures, and 
 supply it with the earth and maintain about it 
 the temperature that it delights in ; withdraw- 
 ing from it, at the same time, all rivals, which 
 in such conditions nature would have thrust 
 upon it, we shall indeed obtain a magnificently 
 developed example of the plant, colossal in size, 
 and splendid in organization ; but we shall 
 utterly lose in it that moral ideal which is de- 
 pendent on its right fulfilment of its appointed 
 functions. It was intended and created by the 
 Deity for the covering of those lonely spots 
 where no other plant could live. It has been 
 thereto endowed with courage and strength, 
 and capabilities of endurance ; its character and 
 glory are not therefore in the gluttonous and 
 idle feeding of its own over-luxuriance, at the 
 expense of other creatures utterly destroyed
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 131 
 
 and rooted out for its good alone ; but in its 
 right doing of its hard duty, and forward 
 climbing into those spots of forlorn hope where 
 it alone can bear witness to the kindness and 
 presence of the spirit that cutteth out rivers 
 among the rocks, as He covers the valleys with 
 corn ; and there, in its vanward place, and only 
 there, where nothing is withdrawn for it, nor 
 hurt by it, and where nothing can take part 
 of its honour, nor usurp its throne, are its 
 strength and fairness, and price, and goodness 
 in the sight of God to be truly esteemed. The 
 first time I saw the Soldanella Alpina, before 
 spoken of, it was growing of magnificent size 
 on a sunny Alpine pasture, among bleating of 
 sheep, and lowing of cattle, associated with 
 a profusion of Geum Montanum, and Ranun- 
 culus Pyrenaeus. I noticed it only because 
 new to me nor perceived any peculiar beauty 
 in its cloven flower. Some days after, I found 
 it alone, among the rack of the higher clouds, 
 and howling of glacier winds ; and, as I des- 
 cribed it, piercing through an edge of avalanche 
 which in its retiring had left the new ground 
 brown and lifeless, and as if burnt by recent
 
 132 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 fire. The plant was poor and feeble, and seem- 
 ingly exhausted with its efforts, but it was 
 then that I comprehended its ideal character, 
 and saw its noble function and order of glory 
 among the constellations of the earth. 
 
 56. GRASSES. Minute, granular, feathery, 
 or downy seed-vessels, mingling quaint brown 
 punctuation, and dusty tremors of dancing 
 grain, with the bloom of the nearer fields ; 
 and casting softness of plumy mist along their 
 surfaces far away ; mysterious evermore, not 
 only with dew in the morning, or mirage at 
 noon, but with the shaking threads of fine 
 arborescence, each a little belfry of grainbells, 
 all a-chime. 
 
 57. Gather a single blade of grass, and 
 examine for a minute quietly its narrow 
 sword-shaped strip of fluted green. Nothing, 
 as it seems, there of notable goodness or 
 beauty. A very little strength and a very little 
 tallness, and a few delicate long lines meeting 
 in a point, not a perfect point neither,' but 
 blunt and unfinished, by no means a credit-
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 133 
 
 able or apparently much-cared-for example 
 of Nature's workmanship, made, only to be 
 trodden on to-day, and to-morrow to be cast 
 into the oven, and a little pale and hollow stalk, 
 feeble and flaccid, leading down to the dull 
 brown fibres of roots. And yet, think of it 
 well, and judge whether of all the gorgeous 
 flowers that beam in summer air, and of all 
 strong and goodly trees, pleasant to the eyes, 
 or good for food, stately palm and pine, 
 strong ash and oak, scented citron, burdened 
 vine there be any by man so deeply loved, by 
 God so highly graced, as that narrow point 
 of feeble green. And well does it fulfil its 
 mission. Consider what we owe merely to the 
 meadow grass, to the covering of the dark 
 ground by that glorious enamel, by the com- 
 panies of those soft, and countless, and peace- 
 ful spears. The fields ! Follow forth but for 
 a little time the thoughts of all that we -ought 
 to recognize in these words. All spring and 
 summer is in them the walks by silent, 
 scented paths the rests in noon-day heat, 
 the joy of herds and flocks, the power of all 
 shepherd life and meditation, the life of sun-
 
 134 FRONDES AGEESTES. 
 
 light upon the world falling in emerald streaks, 
 and falling in soft blue shadows where else 
 it would have struck upon the dark mould, or 
 scorching dust. Pastures beside the pacing 
 brooks, soft banks and knolls of lowly hills, 
 thymy slopes of down, overlooked by the blue 
 line of lifted sea, crisp lawns, all dim with early 
 dew, or smooth in evening warmth of barred 
 sunshine, dinted by happy feet, and softening in 
 their fall the sound of loving voices all these 
 are summed in those simple words ; and these 
 are not all. We may not measure to the full 
 the depth of this heavenly gift in our own land, 
 though still as we think of it longer, the infinite 
 of that meadow sweetness, Shakspeare's pecu- 
 liar joy, would open on us more and more ; yet 
 we have it but in part. Go out in the spring 
 time among the meadows that slope from the 
 shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their 
 lower mountains. There, mingled with the 
 taller Gentians, and the white Narcissus, ,the 
 grass grows deep and free ; and as you follow 
 the winding mountain paths, beneath arching 
 boughs, all veiled with blossom paths that 
 for ever droop and rise over the green banks
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 135 
 
 and mounds sweeping down in scented undu- 
 lation steep to the blue water, studded here 
 and there with new-mown heaps filling all the 
 air with fainter sweetness,- look up towards 
 the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting 
 
 o * o 
 
 green roll silently into their long inlets among 
 the shadows of the pines ; and we may perhaps 
 at last know the meaning of those quiet words 
 of the 147th Psalm, " He maketh grass to grow 
 upon the mountains." 
 
 Assembling the images we have traced, and 
 adding the simplest of all, from Isaiah xl. 6., 
 we find the grass and flowers are types, in 
 their passing, of the passing of human life, 
 and in their excellence, of the excellence of 
 human life ; and this in twofold way ; first 
 by their beneficence, and then by their en- 
 durance the grass of the earth, in giving 
 the seed of corn, and in its beauty under 
 tread of foot and stroke of scythe ; and the 
 grass of the waters, in giving its freshness for 
 our rest, and in its bending before the wave. 
 But, understood in the broad human and 
 Divine sense, the "herb yielding seed" (as 
 opposed to the fruit tree yielding fruit) includes
 
 336 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 a third family of plants, and fulfils a third 
 office to the human race. It includes the great 
 family of the lints and flaxes, and fulfils thus 
 the three offices of giving food, raiment, and 
 rest. Follow out this fulfilment ; consider the 
 association of the linen garment and the linen 
 embroidery with the priestly office and the 
 furniture of the tabernacle, and consider how 
 the rush has been to all time the first natural 
 carpet thrown under the human foot. Then 
 next observe the three virtues definitely set 
 forth by the three families of plants not arbi- 
 trarily or fancifully associated with them, but 
 in all the three cases marked for us by Scriptu- 
 ral words: 1st, Cheerfulness or joyful serenity; 
 in the grass for food and beauty " Consider 
 the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they toil 
 not, neither do they spin." 2nd. Humility ; in 
 the grass" for rest "A bruised reed shall he not 
 break." 3rd. Love ; in the grass for clothing, 
 (because of its swift kindling,) " The smoking 
 flax shall he not quench." And then finally 
 observe the confirmation of these last two 
 images in, I suppose, the most important pro- 
 phecy, relating to the future state of the Chris-
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 137 
 
 tian Church, which occurs in the Old Testament, 
 namely that contained in the closing chapters 
 of Ezekiel. The measures of the Temple of 
 God are to be taken ; and because it is only by 
 charity and humility that those measures ever 
 can be taken, the angel has, " a line of flax in 
 his hand, and a measuring reed." The use of 
 the line was to measure the land, and of the 
 reed to take the dimensions of the buildings ; 
 so the buildings of the church, or its labours, 
 are to be measured by humility ; and its terri- 
 tory or land, by love. 
 
 58. LEAVES motionless. The strong pines 
 wave above them, and the weak grasses tremble 
 beside them ; but the blue stars rest upon the 
 earth with a peace as of heaven ; and far along 
 the ridges of iron rock, moveless as they, the 
 rubied crests of Alpine rose flash in the low 
 rays of morning. 
 
 59. MOSSES. Meek creatures! the first 
 mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed soft- 
 ness its dintless rocks ; creatures full of pity, 
 covering with strange and tender honour the
 
 138 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 scarred disgrace of ruin, laying quiet finger 
 on the trembling stones to teach them rest. 
 No words, that I know of, will say what 
 these mosses are. None are delicate enough, 
 none perfect enough, none rich enough. How 
 is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred 
 and beaming green, the starred divisions 
 of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the rock 
 spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass, 
 the traceries of intricate silver, and fringes 
 of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished 
 through every fibre into fitful brightness and 
 glossy traverses of silken change, yet all 
 subdued and pensive, and framed for sim- 
 plest, sweetest offices of grace ? They Avill 
 not be gathered like the flowers, for chaplet, 
 or love-token ; but of these the wild bird 
 will make its nest, and the wearied child his 
 pillow. 
 
 And as the earth's first mercy, so they are 
 its last gift to us : when all other service is 
 vain, from plant and tree, the soft mosses 
 and gray lichen take up their watch by the 
 head-stone. The woods, the blossoms, the 
 gift-bearing grasses, have done their parts for
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE: PLANTS AND FLOWERS. 139 
 
 a time ; but these do service for ever. Trees 
 for the builder's yard, flowers for the bride's 
 chamber, corn for the granary, moss for the 
 grave. 
 
 60. LICHENS. As in one sense the humblest, 
 in another they are the most honoured of the 
 earth-children. Unfading as motionless, the 
 worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes 
 not. Strong in loveliness, they neither blanch in 
 heat, nor pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered, 
 constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of 
 the dark, eternal tapestries of the hills; to 
 them, slow-pencilled, iris-dyed, the tender fram- 
 ing of their endless imagery. Sharing the 
 stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share 
 also its endurance ; and while the winds of 
 departing spring scatter the white hawthorn 
 blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims 
 on the parched meadow the drooping of its 
 cowslip gold, far above, among the mountains, 
 the silver lichen spots rest, star-like, on the 
 stone : and the gathering orange stain, upon 
 the edge of yonder western peak, reflects the 
 sunsets of a thousand years.
 
 140 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 SECTION VIII. 
 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 61. THE most helpful and sacred work which 
 can at present be done for humanity, is to teach 
 people (chiefly by example, as all best teaching 
 must be done) not how " to better themselves," 
 but how to " satisfy themselves." It is the curse 
 of every evil nature and evil creature to eat and 
 not be satisfied. The words of blessing are, that 
 they shall eat and be satisfied ; and as there is only 
 one kind of water which quenches all thirst, so 
 there is only one kind of bread which satisfies 
 all hunger the bread of justice or righteous- 
 ness ; which, hungering after, men shall always 
 be filled, that being the bread of Heaven ; but 
 hungering after the bread or wages of un- 
 righteousness, shall not be filled, that being the 
 bread of Sodom. And in order to teach men 
 how to be satisfied, it is necessary fully to un- 
 derstand the art of joy and humble life this,
 
 EDUCATION. 141 
 
 at present, of all arts or sciences, being the one 
 most needing study. Humble life, that is to 
 say, proposing to itself no future exaltation, but 
 only a sweet continuance ; not excluding the 
 idea of foresight, but wholly of fore-sorrow, 
 and taking no troublous thought for coming 
 days ; so also not excluding the idea of provi- 
 dence or provision, but wholly of accumula- 
 tion ; the life of domestic affection and domes- 
 tic peace, full of sensitiveness to all elements 
 of costless and kind pleasure ; therefore, 
 chiefly to the loveliness of the natural world. 
 
 62. "We shall find that the love of nature, 
 wherever it has existed, has been a faithful and 
 sacred element of human feeling ; that is to say, 
 supposing all the circumstances otherwise the 
 same with respect to two individuals, the one 
 who loves nature most will be always found to 
 have more capacity for faith in God than the 
 other. Nature-worship will be found to bring 
 with it such a sense of the presence and power 
 of a Great Spirit as no mere reasoning can 
 either induce or controvert ; and where that 
 nature worship is innocently pursued i.e., with
 
 142 FKONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 due respect to other claims on time, feeling, and 
 exertion, and associated with the higher prin- 
 ciples of religion, it becomes the channel of 
 certain sacred truths, which bj no other means 
 can be conveyed. 
 
 63. Instead of supposing the love of nature 
 necessarily connected with the faithlessness of 
 the age, I believe it is connected properly with 
 the benevolence and liberty * of the age ; that 
 is precisely the most healthy element which 
 distinctively belongs to us ; and that out of it, 
 cultivated no longer in levity or ignorance but 
 in earnestness and as a duty, results will spring 
 of an importance at present inconceivable ; and 
 lights arise, which, for the first time in man's 
 history, will reveal to him the true nature of 
 his life, the true field for his energies, and the 
 true relations between him and his Maker. 
 
 * I forget, now, what I meant by ' liberty ' in this 
 passage ; but I often used the word in my first 
 writings, in a good sense, thinking of Scott's moor- 
 land rambles, and the like. It is very wonderful to 
 me, now, to see what hopes I had once : but Turner 
 was alive, then ; and the sun used to shine, and rivers 
 to sparkle.
 
 EDUCATION. 143 
 
 64. To any person who has all his senses 
 about him, a quiet walk, over not more than 
 ten or twelve miles of road a day, is the 
 most amusing of all travelling ; and all tra- 
 velling becomes dull in exact proportion to its 
 rapidity. 
 
 Going by railroad I do not consider as tra- 
 velling at all ; it is merely " being sent" to a 
 place, and very little different from becoming 
 a parcel. 
 
 65. I believe an immense gain in the bodily 
 health and happiness of the upper classes 
 would follow on their steadily endeavouring, 
 however clumsily, to make the physical exer- 
 tion they now necessarily exert in amusements, 
 definitely serviceable. It would be far better, 
 for instance, that a gentleman should mow his 
 own fields, than ride over other people's. 
 
 66. In order to define what is fairest, you must 
 delight in what is fair ; and I know not how 
 few or how many there may be who take such 
 delight. Once I could speak joyfully about 
 beautiful things, thinking to be understood ;
 
 144 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 now I cannot, any more, for it seems to me that 
 no one regards them. Wherever I look or travel, 
 in England or abroad, I see that men, wherever 
 they can reach, destroy all beauty. They seem 
 to have no other desire or hope but to have 
 large houses, and to be able to move fast. Every 
 perfect and lovely spot which they can touch, 
 they defile. Thus the railroad bridge over the 
 fall of Schaffhausen, and that round the Clarens 
 shore of the lake of Geneva, have destroyed the 
 power of two pieces of scenery of which nothing 
 can ever supply the place, in appeal to the 
 higher ranks of European mind. 
 
 67. The first thing which I remember as an 
 event in life, was being taken by my nurse to 
 the brow of Friar's Crag on Derwentwater. The 
 intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in 
 looking through the hollows in the mossy roots, 
 over the crag into the dark lake, has associated 
 itself more or less with all twining roots of 
 trees ever since. Two other things I remember 
 as, in a sort, beginnings of life ; crossing 
 Shap-Fells, being let out of the chaise to run 
 up the hills, and going through Glenfarg, near
 
 EDUCATION. 145 
 
 Kinross, on a winter's morning, when the rocks 
 were hung with icicles; these being culminating 
 points in an early life of more travelling than is 
 usually indulged to a child. In such journey- 
 ings, whenever they brought me near hills, and 
 in all mountain ground and scenery, I had a 
 pleasure, as early as I can remember, and con- 
 tinuing till I was eighteen or twenty, infinitely 
 greater than any which lias been since possible 
 to me in anything. 
 
 68. A fool always wants to shorten space and 
 time ; a wise man wants to lengthen both. A 
 fool wants to kill space and time; a wise man, 
 first to gain them, then to animate them. 
 
 69. I suspect that system makers in general 
 are not of much more use, each in his own do- 
 main, than, in that of Pomona, the old women 
 who tie cherries upon sticks, for the more port- 
 ableness of the same. To cultivate well, and 
 choose well your cherries, is of some importance ; 
 but if they can be had in their own wild way 
 of clustering about their crabbed stalks, it is a 
 better connection for them than any others ; 
 
 10
 
 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 and if they cannot, then so that they be not 
 bruised, it makes to a boy of practical dis- 
 position not much difference whether he gets 
 them by handfuls, or in beaded symmetry on 
 the exalting stick. 
 
 70. Every great man is always being helped 
 by everybody, for his gift is to get good out of 
 all things and all persons. 
 
 71. Grod appoints to every one of His crea- 
 tures a separate mission, and if they discharge 
 it honourably, if they quit themselves like men, 
 and faithfully follow the light which is in them, 
 withdrawing from it all cold and quenching 
 influence, there will assuredly come of it such 
 burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, 
 shall shine before men, and be of service con- 
 stant and holy. Degrees infinite of lustre there 
 must always be, but the weakest among us has 
 a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is 
 peculiar to him, and which worthily used, AY ill 
 be a gift also to his race for ever. 
 
 72. There is not any matter, nor any spirit,
 
 EDUCATION. 147 
 
 nor any creature but it is capable of a unity of 
 some kind with other creatures ; and in that 
 unity is its perfection and theirs, and a pleasure 
 also for the beholding of all other creatures that 
 can behold. So the unity of spirits is partly in 
 their sympathy, and partly in their giving and 
 taking, and always in their love ; and these are 
 their delight and their strength ; for their 
 strength is in their co-working and army fel- 
 lowship, and their delight is in their giving 
 and receiving of alternate and perpetual good ; 
 their inseparable dependency on each other's 
 being, and their essential and perfect depending 
 on their Creator's. And so the unity of earthly 
 creatures is their power, and their peace ; not 
 like the dead and cold peace of undisturbed 
 stones and solitary mountains, but the living 
 peace of trust, and the living power of support; 
 of hands that hold each other and are still.* 
 
 75. It is good to read of that kindness and 
 
 * A long, affected, and obscure second volume sen- 
 tence, written in imitation of Hooker. One short 
 sentence from Proverbs is the sum of it: "How can 
 one be warm alone ? "
 
 148 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 humbleness of St. Francis of Assisi, who spoke 
 never to bird, nor to cicada, nor even to wolf 
 and beasts of prey, but as his brother ; and so 
 we find are moved the minds of all good and 
 mighty men, as in the lesson that we have from 
 the ' Mariner ' of Coleridge, and yet more truly 
 and rightly taught in the ' Heartleap Well' 
 
 *' Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
 With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels "- 
 
 and again in the ' White Doe ' of Rylstone, 
 w'ith the added teaching, that anguish of our 
 
 own 
 
 " Is tempered and allayed by sympathies 
 Aloft ascending, and descending deep, 
 Even to the inferior kinds" 
 
 so that I know not of anything more destruc- 
 tive of the whole theoretic faculty, not to say 
 of the Christian character and human intellect,* 
 than those accursed sports, in which man makes 
 
 * I am more and more grieved, as I re-read this 
 and other portions of the most affected and weak of 
 all my books, (written in a moulting time of my life,) 
 the second volume of 'Modern Painters,' at its 
 morbid violence of passion and narrowness of thought. 
 Yet, at heart, the book was like my others, honest ; 
 and in substance it is mostly good ; but all boiled 
 to rags.
 
 EDUCATION. 149 
 
 of himself cat, tiger, leopard, and alligator in 
 one ; and gathers into one continuance of 
 cruelty, for his amusement, all the devices that 
 brutes sparingly and at intervals use against 
 each other for their necessities. 
 
 74. He who loves not God, nor his brother, 
 cannot love the grass beneath his feet, nor the 
 creatures which live not for his uses, filling 
 those spaces in the universe which he needs 
 not ; while on the other hand, none can love 
 God, nor his human brother, without loving all 
 things which his Father loves ; nor without 
 looking upon them every one as in that respect 
 his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than he, 
 if, in the under concords they have to fill, their 
 part is touched more truly.* 
 
 75. Things may always be seen truly by can- 
 
 * Morbidly Franciscan, again ! and I am really 
 compelled to leave out one little bit my friend liked, 
 as all kindly and hopeful women would ; about 
 everything turning out right, and being to some good 
 end. For we have no business whatever with the 
 ends of things, but with their beings ; and their 
 beings are often entirely bad.
 
 150 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 did people, though never completely. No human 
 Capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing ; 
 but we may see more and more of it the longer 
 we look. Every individual temper will see 
 something different in it ; but supposing the 
 tempers honest, all the differences are there. 
 Every advance in our acuteness of perception 
 will show us something new ; but the old and 
 first discerned thing will still be there, not 
 falsified, only modified and enriched by the 
 new perceptions, becoming continually more 
 beautiful in its harmony with them, and more 
 approved as a part of the infinite truth.
 
 MORALITIES. 151 
 
 SECTION IX. 
 
 MORALITIES. 
 
 76. WHEN people read, "the law came by 
 Moses, but grace and truth by Christ," do they 
 suppose it means that the law was ungracious 
 and untrue ? The law was given for a founda- 
 tion ; the grace, (or mercy) and truth for fulfil- 
 ment ; the whole forming one glorious Trinity 
 of judgment, mercy, and truth.* And if people 
 would but read the text of their Bibles with 
 heartier purpose of understanding it, instead of 
 superstitiously, they would see that throughout 
 
 * A great deal of the presumption and narrowness 
 caused by my having been bred in the Evangelical 
 schools, and which now fill me with shame and distress 
 in re-reading ' Modern Painters,' is, to my present 
 mind, atoned for by the accurate thinking by which 
 I broke my way through to the great truth expressed 
 in this passage, which all my later writings, without 
 exception, have been directed to maintain and illus- 
 trate.
 
 152 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 the parts which they are intended to make 
 most personally their own, (the Psalms,) it is 
 always the Law which is spoken of with chief 
 joy. The Psalms respecting mercy are often 
 sorrowful, as in thought of what it cost ; but 
 those respecting the Law are always full ot 
 delight. David cannot contain himself for joy 
 in thinking of it, he is never weary of its 
 praise : " How love I thy law ! it is my medi- 
 tation all the day. Thy testimonies are my 
 delight and my counsellors ; sweeter also than 
 honey and the honeycomb." 
 
 77. I suppose there is no event in the whole life 
 of Christ to which, in hours of doubt or fear, men 
 turn with more anxious thirst to know the close 
 facts of it, or with more earnest and passionate 
 dwelling upon every syllable of its recorded 
 narrative, than Christ's showing Himself to His 
 disciples at the Lake of Galilee. . There is some- 
 thing pre-eminently open, natural, full fronting 
 our disbelief, in this manifestation. The others, 
 recorded after the resurrection, were sudden, 
 phantom-like, occurring to men in profound 
 sorrow and wearied agitation of heart ; not, it
 
 MORALITIES. 153 
 
 might seem, safe judges of what they saw. 
 But the agitation was now over. They had 
 gone back to their daily work, thinking still 
 their business lay net-wards, unmeshed from 
 the literal rope and drag. " Simon Peter saith 
 unto them, I go a-fishing. They say unto him, 
 We also go with^ thee." True words enough, 
 and having far echo beyond those Galilean 
 hills. That night they caught nothing ; but 
 when the morning came, in the clear light 
 of it, behold ! a figure stood on the shore. 
 They were not thinking of anything but their 
 fruitless hauls. They had no guess who it was. 
 It asked them simply if they had caught any- 
 thing. They say, No, and it tells them to cast 
 again. And John shades his eyes from the 
 morning sun with his hand to look who it is ; 
 and though the glistening of the sea, too, dazzles 
 him, he makes out who it is at last ; and poor 
 Simon, not to be outrun this time, tightens his 
 fisher's coat about him, and dashes in over the 
 nets. One would have liked to see him^swim 
 those hundred yards, and stagger to his knees 
 upon the beach. 
 
 Well, the others get to the beach, too, in
 
 154 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 time, in such slow way as men in general 
 do get in this world to its true shore, much 
 impeded bj that wonderful " dragging the net 
 with fishes " ; but they get there seven of 
 them in all, first the Denier, and then the 
 slowest believer, and then the quickest believer, 
 and then the two throne-seekers, and two more, 
 we know not who. 
 
 They sit down on the shore face to face with 
 Him, and eat their broiled fish as He bids. 
 And then to Peter, all dripping still, shivering, 
 and amazed, staring at Christ in the sun, on 
 the other side of the coal-fire, thinking a little 
 perhaps of what happened by another coal- 
 fire, when it was colder, and having had no 
 word changed with him by his Master since* 
 that look of His, to him so amazed, comes 
 the question, " Simon, lovest thou Me ? " Try 
 to feel that a little ; and think of it till it is 
 true to you : and then take up that infinite 
 monstrosity and hypocrisy, Raphael's cartoon 
 of the charge to Peter. Note first the bold 
 fallacy the putting all the Apostles there, a 
 mere lie to serve the Papal heresy of the Petric 
 supremacy, by putting them all in the back-
 
 MORALITIES. 155 
 
 ground while Peter receives the charge, and 
 making them all witnesses to it. Note the 
 handsomely curled hair and neatly tied san- 
 dals of the men who had been out all night in 
 the sea-mists, and on the slimy decks ; note 
 their convenient dresses for going a-fishing, 
 with trains that lie a yard along the ground, 
 and goodly fringes all made to match; an 
 apostolic fishing costume. Note how Peter espe- 
 cially, (whose chief glory was in his wet coat 
 girt about him, and naked limbs) is enveloped 
 in folds and fringes, so as to kneel and hold his 
 keys with grace. No fire of coals at all, nor 
 lonely mountain shore, but a pleasant Italian 
 landscape, full of villas and churches, and a 
 flock of sheep to be pointed at ; and the whole 
 group of Apostles, not round Christ, as they 
 would have been naturally, but straggling away 
 in a line, that they may all be shown. The sim- 
 ple truth is, that the moment we look at the 
 picture we feel our belief of the whole thing 
 taken away. There is visibly no possibility of 
 that group ever having existed, in any place, 
 or on any occasion. It is all a mere mythic 
 absurdity, and faded concoction of fringes,
 
 156 FRONDES AGKESTES. 
 
 muscular arms, and curly heads of Greek 
 philosophers. 
 
 78. Among the children of God there is always 
 that fearful and bowed apprehension of His 
 majesty, and that sacred dread of all offence to 
 Him which is called the Fear of God, yet of 
 real and essential fear there is not any, but 
 clinging of confidence to Him as their Rock, 
 Fortress, and Deliverer ; and perfect love, and 
 casting out of fear ; so that it is not possible, 
 that, while the mind is rightly bent on Him, 
 there should be dread of anything earthly or 
 supernatural ; and the more dreadful seems the 
 height of His majesty, the less fear they feel 
 that dwell in the shadow of it. " Of whom 
 shall I be afraid ? " 
 
 79. If, for every rebuke that we utter of 
 men's vices, we put forth a claim upon their 
 hearts ; if from every assertion of God's de- 
 mands from them, we could substitute a dis- 
 play of His kindness to them ; if side by side 
 with every warning of death, we could exhibit 
 proofs and promises of immortality ; if, in fine,
 
 MORALITIES. 157 
 
 instead of assuming the being of an awful 
 Deity, which men, though they cannot, and 
 dare not deny, are always unwilling, some- 
 times unable to conceive, we were to show 
 them a near, visible, inevitable, but all bene- 
 volent Deity, whose presence makes the earth 
 itself a heaven, I think there would be fewer 
 deaf children sitting in the market-place. 
 
 80. If not by sympathy discovered, it is not 
 in words explicable with wiiat divine lines and 
 lights the exercise of godliness and charity will 
 mould and gild the hardest and coldest counte- 
 nance, neither to what darkness their departure 
 will consign the loveliest. For there is nat any 
 virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, 
 will not impress a new fairness upon the fea- 
 tures. 
 
 81. The love of the human race is increased 
 by their individual differences, and the unity of 
 the creature, made perfect by each having some- 
 thing to bestow and to receive, bound to the 
 rest by a thousand various necessities and vari- 
 ous gratitudes ; humility in each rejoicing to
 
 158 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 admire in his fellow that which he finds not in 
 himself, and each being in some respect the 
 complement of his race. 
 
 82. They who are as the angels of God in 
 heaven, yet cannot be conceived as so assimilated 
 that their different experiences and affections 
 upon earth shall then be forgotten and effectless : 
 the child, taken early to his place, cannot be ima- 
 gined to wear there such a body, nor to have 
 such thoughts, as the glorified apostle who had 
 finished his course and kept the faith on earth. 
 And so, whatever perfections and likeness of 
 love we may attribute to either the tried or the 
 crowned creatures, there is the difference of the 
 stars in glory among them yet ; differences of 
 original gifts, though not of occupying till their 
 Lord come ; different dispensations of trial and 
 of trust, of sorrows and support, both in their 
 own inward, variable hearts, and in their posi- 
 tions of exposure or of peace, of the gourd 
 shadow and the smiting sun, of calling at heat 
 of day, or eleventh hour, of the house unroofed 
 by faith, or the clouds opened by revelation ; 
 differences in warning, in mercies, in sickness,
 
 MORALITIES. 159 
 
 in signs, in time of calling to account ; alike 
 only they all are by that which is not of them, 
 but the gift of God's unchangeable mercy. 
 " I will give unto this last even as unto thee." 
 
 83. The desire of rest planted in the heart is 
 no sensual nor unworthy one ; but a longing for 
 renovation, and for escape from a state whose 
 every phase is mere preparation for another 
 equally transitory, to one in which permanence 
 becomes possible through perfection. Hence 
 the great call of Christ to men, that call on 
 which St. Augustine fixed as the essential 
 expression of Christian hope, is accompanied 
 by the promise of rest ; and the death bequest 
 of Christ to men, is peace. 
 
 84. He who has once stood beside the grave, 
 to look back upon the companionship which 
 has been for ever closed, feeling how impotent, 
 there, are the wild love, and the keen sorrow, 
 to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless 
 heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the 
 departed spirit, for the hour of unkindness, 
 will scarcely for the future incur that debt to
 
 160 FRONDES AG11ESTES. 
 
 the heart, which can only be discharged to the 
 dust. But the lessons which men receive as 
 individuals, they do ' not learn as nations. 
 Again and again they have seen their noblest 
 descend into the grave, and have thought it 
 enough to garland the tombstone when they 
 had not crowned the brow, and to pay the 
 honour to the ashes, which they had denied 
 to the spirit. Let it not displease them that 
 they are bidden, amidst the tumult and the 
 dazzle of their busy life, to listen for the few 
 voices, and watch for the few lamps, which 
 God has toned and lighted to charm and to 
 guide them, that they may not learn their 
 sweetness by their silence, nor their light by 
 their decay. 
 
 85. In the Cathedral of Lucca, near the en- 
 trance door of the north transept, there is a 
 monument by Jacopo della Quercia to Ilaria di 
 Caretto, the wife of Paolo Guinigi. I name it 
 not as more beautiful or perfect than other ex- 
 amples of the same period ; but as furnishing an 
 instance of the exact and right mean between 
 the rigidity and rudeness of the earlier monu-
 
 MORALITIES. 161 
 
 mental effigies, and the morbid imitation of life 
 sleep, or death, of which the fashion has taken 
 place in modern times. She is lying on a 
 simple couch with a hound at her feet ; not on 
 the side, but with the head laid straight and 
 simply on the hard pillow, in which, let it be 
 observed, there is no effort at deceptive imita- 
 tion of pressure. It is understood as a pillow, 
 but not mistaken for one. The hair is bound 
 in a flat braid over the fair brow, the sweet and 
 arched eyes are closed, the tenderness of the 
 loving lips is set and quiet ; there is that about 
 them which forbids breath ; something which 
 is not death nor sleep, but the pure image of 
 both. The hands are not lifted in prayer, neither 
 folded, but the arms are laid at length upon the 
 body, and the hands cross as they fall. The feet 
 are hidden by the drapery, and the form of the 
 limbs concealed, but not their tenderness. 
 
 86. I do not know any district possessing a 
 more pure or uninterrupted fulness of mountain 
 character, (and that of the highest order,) or 
 which appears to have been less disturbed by 
 foreign agencies, than that which borders the 
 
 11
 
 162 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 course of the Trient between Valarsine and 
 Martigny. The paths which lead to it out of 
 the valley of the Rhone, rising at first in steep 
 circles among the walnut trees, like winding 
 stairs among the pillars of a Gothic tower, 
 retire over the shoulders of the hills into a 
 valley almost unknown, but thickly inhabited 
 by an industrious and patient population. 
 Along the ridges of the rocks, smoothed by old 
 glaciers into long, dark billowy swellings, like 
 the backs of plunging dolphins, the peasant 
 watches the slow colouring of the tufts of moss 
 and roots of herb, which little by little gather a 
 feeble soil over the iron substance ; then, sup- 
 porting the narrow slip of clinging ground 
 with a few stones, he subdues it to the spade ; 
 and in a year or two a little crest of corn is 
 seen waving upon the rocky casque. The 
 irregular meadows run in and out like inlets 
 of lake among these harvested rocks, sweet 
 with perpetual streamlets that seem always to 
 have chosen the steepest places to come down, 
 for the sake of the leaps, scattering their 
 handfuls of crystal this way and that, as the 
 wind takes them, with all the grace, but with
 
 MORALITIES. 163 
 
 none of the formalism, of fountains ; dividing 
 into fanciful change of dash and spring, yet 
 with the seal of their granite channels upon 
 them, as the lightest play of human speech 
 may bear the seal of past toil, and closing back 
 out of their spray to lave the rigid angles, and 
 brighten with silver fringes and glassy films 
 each lower and lower step of sable stone ; until 
 at last, gathered altogether again, except per- 
 haps some chance drops caught on the apple 
 blossom, where it has budded a little nearer the 
 cascade than it did last spring, they find their 
 way down to the turf, and lose themselves in 
 that, silently ; with quiet depth of clear water 
 furrowing among the grass-blades, and looking 
 only like their shadow, but presently emerging 
 again in little startled gushes and laughing 
 hurries, as if they had remembered suddenly, 
 that the day was too short for them to get down 
 the hill. Green field, and glowing rock, and 
 glancing streamlet, all slope together in the 
 sunshine towards the brows of ravines, where 
 the pines take up their own dominion of sad- 
 dened shade ; and with everlasting roar, in the 
 twilight, the stronger torrents thunder down,
 
 1C 4 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 pale from the glaciers, filling all the chasms 
 with enchanted cold, beating themselves to 
 pieces against the great rocks that they have 
 themselves cast down, and forcing fierce way 
 beneath their ghastly poise. The mountain 
 paths stoop to those glens in forky zigzags, 
 leading to some grey and narrow arch, all 
 fringed under its shuddering curve with the 
 ferns that fear the light ; a cross of rough- 
 hewn pine, iron-bound to its parapet, standing 
 dark against the lurid fury of the foam. Far 
 up the glen, as we pause beside the cross, the 
 sky is seen through the openings in the pines 
 thin with excess of light ; and, in its clear 
 consuming flame of white space, the summits 
 of the rocky mountains are gathered into 
 solemn crowns and circlets, all flushed in that 
 strange, faint silence of possession by the sun- 
 shine, which has in it so deep a melancholy, 
 full of power, yet as frail as shadows ; lifeless, 
 like the walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in 
 tender fall of crimson folds, like the veil of 
 some sea spirit, that lives and dies as the foam 
 flashes ; fixed on a perpetual throne, stern 
 against all strength, lifted above all sorrow, and
 
 MORALITIES. 165 
 
 yet effaced and melted utterly into the air by 
 that last sunbeam that has crossed to them 
 from between the two golden clouds. 
 
 High above all sorrow ? Yes ; but not un- 
 witnessing to it. The traveller on his happy 
 journey, as his foot springs from the deep 
 turf, and strikes the pebbles gaily over the 
 edge of the mountain road, sees with a glance 
 of delight the clusters of nut-brown cottages 
 that nestle along those sloping orchards, and 
 glow beneath the boughs of the pines. 
 Here, it may well seem to him, if there be 
 sometimes hardship, there must be at least 
 innocence and peace, and fellowship of the 
 human soul with nature. It is not so. The 
 wild goats that leap along those rocks have as 
 much passion of joy in all that fair work of 
 God as the men that toil among them, perhaps 
 more. Enter the street of one of those villages, 
 
 O / 
 
 and you will find it foul with that gloomy 
 foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by 
 anguish of soul. Here, it is torpor not abso- 
 lute suffering not starvation or disease ; but 
 darkness of calm enduring : the spring, known 
 only as the time of the scythe, and the autumn
 
 166 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 as the time of the sickle, and the sun only as a 
 warmth, the Avind as a chill, and the mountains 
 as a danger. They do not understand so much 
 as the name of beauty, or of knowledge. They 
 understand dimly that of virtue. Love, patience, 
 hospitality, faith, these things they know. To 
 glean their meadows side by side, so happier ; 
 to bear the burden up the breathless mountain 
 flank unmurmuringly ; to bid the stranger drink 
 from their vessel of milk ; to see at the foot of 
 their low death-beds a pale figure upon a cross, 
 dying, also patiently ; in this they are dif- 
 ferent from the cattle and from the stones; but, 
 in all this, unrewarded, as far as concerns the 
 present life. For them, there is neither hope 
 nor passion of spirit; for them, neither advance 
 nor exultation. Black bread, rude roof, dark 
 night, laborious day, weary arm at sunset ; and 
 life ebbs away. No books, no thoughts, no 
 attainments, no rest, except only sometimes a 
 little sitting in the sun under the church wall, 
 as the bell tolls thin and far in the mountain 
 air ; a pattering of a few prayers, not under- 
 stood, by the altar-rails of the dimly gilded 
 chapel, and so, back to the sombre home,
 
 MORALITIES. 167 
 
 with the cloud upon them still unbroken that 
 cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the wild 
 torrents and ruinous stones, and unlightened 
 even in their religion, except by the vague 
 promise of some better thing unknown, min- 
 gled with threatening, and obscured by an 
 unspeakable horror a smoke, as it were, of 
 martyrdom, coiling up with the incense; and 
 amidst the images of tortured bodies and 
 lamenting spirits in hurtling flames, the very 
 cross, for them, dashed more deeply than for 
 others with gouts of blood. 
 
 87. A Highland scene is beyond doubt plea- 
 sant enough in its own way ; but, looked close 
 at, has its shadows.* Here, for instance, is the 
 very fact of one as pretty as I can remember, 
 having seen many. It is a little valley of soft 
 turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by jutting 
 rocks, and broad flakes of nodding fern. From 
 
 * Passage written to be opposed to an exuberant 
 description, by an amiable Scottish pastor, of every- 
 thing flattering to Scotchmen in the Highlands. I 
 have put next to it, a little study of the sadness 
 of Italy.
 
 168 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 one side of it to the other winds, serpentine, a 
 clear brown stream, drooping into quicker 
 ripple as it reaches the end of the oval field, 
 and then, first islanding a purple and white 
 rock with an amber pool, it dashes away into a 
 narrow fall of foam under a thicket of mountain 
 ash and alder. The autumn sun, low, but clear, 
 shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the 
 golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and 
 there, when the breeze has not caught them, 
 rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock. 
 Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket, 
 the carcase of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, 
 lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs pro- 
 truding through the skin, raven-torn ; and the 
 rags of its wool still flickering from the branches 
 that first stayed it as the stream swept it down. 
 A little lower, the current plunges, roaring, 
 into a circular chasm like a well, surrounded 
 on three sides by a chimney-like hollowness of 
 polished rock, down which the foam slips in 
 detached snow-flakes. Round the edges of the 
 pool beneath, the water circles slowly like black 
 oil ; a little butterfly lies on its back, the wings 
 glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly
 
 MORALITIES. 169 
 
 quivering ; a fish rises, and it is gone. Lower 
 down the stream, I can see over a knoll the 
 green and damp turf roofs of four or five 
 hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is 
 trodden by the cattle into a black Slouo-h of 
 
 !/ O 
 
 Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few 
 ill-set stepping stones, with here and there a 
 flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out 
 of sight ; and at the turn of the brook I see a 
 man fishing, with a boy and a dog a pictu- 
 resque and pretty group enough certainly, if 
 they had not been there all day starving. I 
 know them, and I know the dog's ribs also, 
 which are nearly as bare as the dead ewe's ; 
 and the child's wasted shoulders, cutting 
 his old tartan jacket through, so sharp are 
 they. 
 
 88. Perhaps there is no more impressive 
 scene on earth, than the solitary extent of the 
 Campagna of Borne under evening light. Let 
 the reader imagine himself for a moment 
 withdrawn from the sounds and motion of 
 the living world, and sent forth alone into this 
 
 O f 
 
 wild and wasted plain. The earth yields and
 
 170 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 crumbles beneath his feet, tread he never so 
 lightly, for its substance is white, hollow, and 
 carious, like the dusty wreck of the bones of 
 men. The long knotted grass waves and 
 tosses feebly in the evening wind, and the 
 shadows of its motion shake feverishly along 
 the banks of ruin, that lift themselves to the 
 sunlight. Hillocks of mouldering earth heave 
 around him, as if the dead beneath were strug- 
 gling in their sleep. Scattered blocks of black 
 stone, four-square remnants of mighty edifices, 
 not one left upon another, lie upon them to 
 keep them down. A dull purple poisonous 
 haze stretches level along the desert, veiling 
 its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose 
 rents the red light rests, like dying fire on 
 defiled altars ; the blue ridge of the Alban 
 Mount lifts itself against a solemn space of 
 green, clear, quiet sky. Watch-towers of 
 dark clouds stand stedfastly along the pro- 
 montories of the Apennines. From the plain 
 to the mountains, the shattered aqueducts, pier 
 beyond pier, melt into the darkness, like sha- 
 dowy and countless troops of funeral mourners, 
 passing from a nation's grave.
 
 MORALITIES. 171 
 
 89. I was coining down one evening from 
 the Rochers de Naye, above Montreux, having 
 been at work among the limestone rocks, where 
 I could get no water, and, both weary and 
 thirsty. Coming to a spring at a turn of the 
 path, conducted, as usual, by the herdsmen, into 
 a hollowed pine trunk, I stooped to it, and 
 drank deeply. As I raised my head, drawing 
 breath heavily, some one behind me said, " Celui 
 qui boira de cette eau ci, aura encore soif." I 
 turned, not understanding for a moment what 
 was meant, and saw one of the hill peasants, 
 probably returning to his chalet from the 
 market-pkce at Vevay or Villeneuve. As I 
 looked at him with an uncomprehending ex- 
 pression, he went on with the verse : " Mais 
 celui qui boira de 1'eau que je lui donnerai, 
 n'aura jamais soif." 
 
 90. It may perhaps be admitted me * to 
 mark the significance of the earliest mention of 
 mountains in the Mosaic books ; at least of 
 those in which some Divine appointment or 
 
 * With reference to the choice of mountain dwellings 
 by the greater monastic orders.
 
 172 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 command is stated respecting them. They 
 are first brought before us as refuges for 
 God's people from the two judgments of 
 water and fire. The Ark rests upon the 
 mountains of Ararat; and man, having passed 
 through that great Baptism unto death, kneels 
 upon the earth first where it is nearest 
 heaven, and mingles with the mountain clouds 
 the smoke of his sacrifice of thanksgiving. 
 Again; from the midst of the first judgment by 
 fire, the command of the Deity to His servant 
 is, "Escape to the mountain ;" and the morbid 
 fear of the hills, which fills any human mind 
 after long stay in places of luxury and sin, is 
 strangely marked in Lot's complaining reply, 
 " I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some 
 evil take me." The third mention, in way of 
 ordinance, is a far more solemn one, "Abraham 
 lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off." 
 "The Place," the mountain of myrrh, or of 
 bitterness, chosen to fulfil to all the seed of 
 Abraham, far off and near, the inner meaning 
 of promise regarded in that vow: "I will lift up 
 mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh 
 mine help." And the fourth is the delivery
 
 MORALITIES. ] 73 
 
 of the law on Sinai. It seemed then to the 
 monks that the mountains were appointed 
 by their Maker to be to man refuges from 
 Judgment, signs of redemption, and altars 
 of sanctification and obedience ; and they saw 
 them afterwards connected in the manner the 
 most touching and gracious, with the death, 
 after his task had been accomplished, of the 
 first anointed Priest ; the death, in like manner, 
 of the first inspired Lawgiver ; and lastly, with 
 the assumption of His office, by the Eternal 
 Priest, Lawgiver, and Saviour. 
 
 Observe the connection of these three events. 
 Although the time of the deaths of Aaron 
 and Moses was hastened by God's displeasure, 
 we have not, it seems to me, the slightest 
 warrant for concluding that the manner of 
 their deaths was intended to be grievous or 
 dishonourable to them. Far from this, it 
 cannot, I think, be doubted that in the denial 
 of the permission to enter the Promised 
 Land, the whole punishment of their sin was 
 included ; and that, as far as regarded the 
 manner of their deaths, it must have been 
 appointed for them by their Master, in all
 
 174 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 tenderness and love, and with the full purpose 
 of ennobling the close of their service upon 
 the earth. It might have seemed to us more 
 honourable that both should have been permitted 
 to die beneath the shadow of the Tabernacle, 
 the congregation of Israel watching by their 
 side ; and all whom they loved gathered together 
 to receive the last message from the lips of the 
 meek lawgiver, and the last blessing from the 
 prayer of the anointed priest. But it was not 
 thus they were permitted to die. Try to realize 
 that going forth of Aaron from the midst of 
 the congregation. He who had so often done 
 sacrifice for their sin, going forth now to offer 
 up his own spirit. He who had stood among 
 them between the dead and the living, and had 
 seen the eyes of all that great multitude turned 
 to him, that by his intercession their breath 
 might yet be drawn a moment more, going 
 forth now to meet the angel of death face to 
 face, and deliver himself into his hand. Try if 
 you cannot walk in thought with these two 
 brothers, and the son, as they passed the out- 
 most tents of Israel, and turned, while yet the 
 dew lay round about the camp, towards the
 
 MORALITIES. 175 
 
 slopes of Mount Hor ; talking together for the 
 last time, as step by step they felt the steeper 
 rising of the rocks, and hour after hour, beneath 
 the ascending sun, the horizon grew broader 
 as they climbed, and all the folded hills of 
 Idumea, one by one subdued, showed, amidst 
 their hollows in the haze of noon, the windings 
 of that long desert journey, now at last to 
 close. But who shall enter into the thoughts 
 of the High Priest as his eye followed those 
 paths of ancient pilgrimage ; and through the 
 silence of the arid and endless hills, stretching 
 even to the dim peak of Sinai, the whole history 
 of those forty years was unfolded before him, 
 and the mystery of his own ministries revealed 
 to him ; and that other Holy of Holies, of 
 which the mountain peaks were the altars, and 
 the mountain clouds the veil, the firmament of 
 his Father's dwelling, opened to him still more 
 brightly and infinitely as he drew nearer his 
 death? until at last, on the shadeless summit, 
 from him on whom sin was to be laid no more, 
 from him on whose heart the names of sinful 
 nations were to press their graven fire no 
 longer, the brother and the son took breast-
 
 176 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 plate and ephod, and left him to his rest. 
 There is indeed a secretness in this calm faith, 
 and deep restraint of sorrow, into which it is 
 difficult for us to enter ; but the death of Moses 
 himself is more easily to be conceived, and 
 had in it circumstances still more touching as 
 
 O 
 
 regards the influence of the external scene. 
 For forty years Moses had not been alone. The 
 care and burden of all the people, the weight 
 of their woe, and guilt, and death, had been 
 upon him continually. The multitude had been 
 laid upon him as if he had conceived,, them ; 
 their tears had been his meat night and day, 
 until he had felt as if God had withdrawn His 
 favour from him, and he had prayed that he 
 might be slain, and not see his wretchedness. 
 And now at last the command came, " Get 
 thee up into this mountain." The weary hands, 
 that had been so long stayed up against the 
 enemies of Israel, might lean again upon the 
 shepherd's staff, and fold themselves for the 
 shepherd's prayer for the shepherd's slumber. 
 Not strange to his feet, though forty years 
 unknown, the roughness of the bare mountain 
 path, as he climbed from ledge to ledge of
 
 MORALITIES. 177 
 
 Abarim ; not strange to his aged eyes the 
 scattered clusters of the mountain herbage, and 
 the broken shadows of the cliffs, indented far 
 across the silence of uninhabited ravines ; scenes 
 such as those among which, as now, with none 
 beside him but God, he had led his flocks so 
 often ; and which he had left, how painfully ! 
 taking upon him the appointed power to make 
 of the fenced city a wilderness, and to fill the 
 desert with songs of deliverance. It was not 
 to embitter the last hours of his life that God 
 restored to him for a day the beloved "solitudes 
 he had lost, and breathed the peace of the 
 perpetual hills around him, and cast the world 
 in which he had laboured, and sinned, far 
 beneath his feet in that mist of dying blue ; 
 all sin, all wandering, soon to be forgotten for 
 ever. The Dead Sea a type of God's anger 
 understood by him, of all men, most clearly, 
 who had seen the earth open her mouth, and 
 the sea his depth, to overwhelm the companies 
 of those who contended with his Master laid 
 waveless beneath him ; and beyond it the 
 fair hills of Judah, and the soft plains and 
 banks of Jordan, purple in the evening light 
 
 12
 
 178 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 as with the blood of redemption, and fading in 
 their distant fulness into mysteries of promise 
 and of love. There, with his unabated strength, 
 his undimmed glance, lying down upon the 
 utmost rocks, with angels waiting near to 
 contend for the spoils of his spirit, he put off 
 his earthly armour. We do deep reverence to 
 his companion prophet, for whom the chariot 
 of fire came down from heaven ; but was his 
 death less noble whom his Lord Himself buried 
 in the vales of Moab, keeping, in the secrets 
 of the eternal counsels, the knowledge of a 
 sepulchre, from which he was to be called in 
 the fulness of time, to talk with that Lord 
 upon Hermon of the death that He should 
 accomplish at Jerusalem ? 
 
 And lastly, let us turn our thoughts for a 
 few moments to the cause of the resurrection 
 of these two prophets. We are all of us too 
 much in the habit of passing it by, as a 
 thing mystical and inconceivable, taking place 
 in the life of Christ for some purpose 
 not by us to be understood, or, at the best, 
 merely as a manifestation of His divinity 
 by brightness of heavenly light, and the
 
 MOBILITIES. 179 
 
 ministering of the spirits of the dead, intended 
 to strengthen the faith of His three chosen 
 apostles. And in this, as in many other events 
 recorded by the Evangelists, we lose half the 
 meaning, and evade the practical power upon 
 ourselves, by never accepting in its fulness the 
 idea that our Lord was " perfect man," 
 " tempted in all things like as we are." Our 
 preachers are continually trying, in all manner 
 of subtle ways, to explain the union of the 
 Divinity with the Manhood an explanation 
 which certainly involves first their being able 
 to describe the nature of Deity itself, or, in 
 plain words, to comprehend God. They never 
 can explain, in any one particular, the union 
 of the natures ; they only succeed in weakening 
 the faith of their hearers as to the entireness of 
 either. The thing they have to do is precisely 
 the contrary of this to insist upon the entire- 
 ness of both. We never think of Christ enough 
 as God, never enough as Man ; the instinctive 
 habit of our minds being always to miss of the 
 Divinity, and the reasoning and enforced habit 
 to miss of the humanity. We are afraid to 
 harbour in our own hearts, or to utter in the
 
 180 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 hearing of others, any thought of our Lord as 
 hungering, tired, sorrowful, having a human 
 soul, a human will, and affected by events of 
 human life, as a finite creature is ; and yet one 
 half of the efficiency of His atonement, and the 
 whole of the efficiency of His example, depend 
 on His having been this to the full. Consider, 
 therefore, the Transfiguration as it relates to 
 the human feelings of our Lord. It was the 
 first definite preparation for His death. He 
 had foretold it to His disciples six days before ; 
 then takes with Him the three chosen ones 
 into "an high mountain apart." From an 
 exceeding high mountain, at the first taking 
 on Him the ministry of life, He had beheld 
 and rejected the kingdoms of the earth, and 
 their glory : now, on a high mountain, He 
 takes upon Him the ministry of death. Peter 
 and they that were with Him, as in Geth- 
 semane, were heavy with sleep. Christ's work 
 had to be done alone. 
 
 The tradition is, that the Mount of Trans- 
 figuration was the summit of Tabor ; but Tabor 
 is neither a high mountain, nor was it in any 
 sense a mountain " apart,' 1 '' being in those years
 
 MORALITIES. 181 
 
 both inhabited and fortified. All the immedi- 
 ately preceding ministries of Christ had been at 
 Cesarea Philippi. There is no mention of travel 
 southward in the six days that intervened be- 
 tween the warning given to His disciples and 
 the going up into the hill. What other hill 
 could it be than the southward slope of that 
 goodly mountain, Hermon, which is indeed the 
 centre of all the Promised Land, from the enter- 
 ing in of Hamath unto the river of Egypt ; the 
 mount of fruitfulness, from which the springs 
 of Jordan descended to the valleys of Israel? 
 Along its mighty forest avenues, until the grass 
 grew fair with the mountain lilies, His feet 
 
 o * 
 
 dashed in the dew of Hermon, He must have 
 gone to pray His first recorded prayer about 
 death ; and from the steep of it, before He 
 knelt, could see to the south all the dwellings 
 
 ' O 
 
 of the people that had sat in darkness, and seen 
 the great light, the land of Zabulon and of 
 Naphtali, Galilee of the nations, could see, 
 even with His human sight, the gleam of that 
 lake by Capernaum and Chorazin, and many 
 a place loved by Him, and vainly ministered to, 
 whose house was now left unto them desolate ;
 
 182 FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 and chief of all, far in the utmost blue, the hills 
 above Nazareth, sloping down to His old home ; 
 hills on which yet the stones lay loose that had 
 been taken up to cast at Him when He left 
 them for ever. 
 
 "And as He prayed, two men stood by 
 Him." Among the many ways in which 
 we miss the help and hold of Scripture, none 
 is more subtle than our habit of supposing 
 that, even as man, Christ was free from the 
 fear of death. How could He then have been 
 tempted as we are ? since among all the trials 
 of the earth, none spring from the dust more 
 terrible than that fear. It had to be borne by 
 Him, indeed, in a unity, which we can never 
 comprehend, with the foreknowledge of victory, 
 as His sorrow for Lazarus with the conscious- 
 ness of His power to restore Him ; but it had 
 to be borne, and that in its full earthly terror ; 
 and the presence of it is surely marked for us 
 enough by the rising of those two at His side. 
 When, in the desert, He was girding Himself 
 for the work of life, angels of life came and 
 
 / ~ 
 
 ministered to Him ; now in the fair world, 
 when He is girding Himself for the work of
 
 MORALITIES. 183 
 
 death, the ministrants come to Him from the 
 grave. But, from the grave, conquered. One 
 from that tomb under Abarim, which His 
 own hand had sealed long ago ; the other, 
 from the rest into which he had entered 
 without seeing corruption. " There stood by 
 him Moses and Elias, and spake of His de- 
 cease." Then, when the prayer is ended, first, 
 since the star paused over him at Bethlehem, 
 the full glory falls upon Him from heaven, 
 and the testimony is borne to His everlasting 
 Sonship and power. " Hear ye Him." 
 
 If, in their remembrance of these things, 
 and in their endeavour to follow in the foot- 
 steps of their Master, religious men of bygone 
 days, closing themselves in the hill-solitudes, 
 forgot sometimes, and sometimes feared, the 
 duties they owed to the active world, we 
 may perhaps pardon them more easily than 
 we ought to pardon ourselves, if we neither 
 seek any influence for good, nor submit to 
 it unsought, in scenes to which thus all the 
 men whose writings we receive as inspired, 
 together with their Lord, retired whenever 
 they had any task or trial laid upon them
 
 184) FRONDES AGRESTES. 
 
 needing more than their usual strength of 
 spirit Nor perhaps should we have unprofit- 
 ably entered into the mind of the earlier ages, 
 if among our other thoughts, as we watch the 
 chains of the snowy mountains rise on the hori- 
 zon, we should sometimes admit the memory of 
 the hour in which their Creator, among their 
 solitudes, entered on His travail for the salva- 
 tion of our race ; and indulge the dream, that 
 as the flaming and trembling mountains of the 
 earth seem to be the monuments of the mani- 
 festing of His terror on Sinai, these pure and 
 white hills, near to the heaven, and sources of 
 all good to the earth, are the appointed memo- 
 rials of that light of His mercy, that fell, snow- 
 like, on the Mount of Transfiguration. 
 
 FINIS. 
 
 Watson and Hazell, Printers, London and Aylesbury.
 
 A 000138534 3