imagination you prefer keeping your mind occupied with actual objects and
after a strong impression or two, you get wearied, and all that follow are
weak in comparison extinguished by the recent feeling. People talk about
Byron's writing shaky hieroglyphics in storms on the Lake of Geneva I am
quite certain if he ever did so, it was with an eye to future facsimiles, and
perpetuation of blots, for the public to inspect with critical eyes and say
were illustrative of something.
There is your blot impatient, consequent on the refusal of the inspired
pen to let down its ink; your blot speculative, doggedly perpetrated and
prolonged in the destitution of ideas your blot nervous, likely to occur in
abdications and other literary unpleasantnesses {vide Bourrienne's Life of Bon.);1
your blot decorative, a mere tendency to embonpoint in a flourish your blot
imaginative, running playfully into horns, tails and tusks and your blot accidental, passing itself off for one of its highly respectable relations
but as I
was saying if Byron ever did take pen and ink on to the lake of Geneva
they certainly might have been used to much better purpose out of a decent
He couldn't write anything bad; and so his
inkstand on a steady table.
stanza about thunder alive, said to have been written in such circumstances,
takes its place well enough among the rest of Childe H.,^ but I am positive it
owes nothing whatever to its aquatic origin. For myself, I couldn't write anything in such a case. When every moment offers some fresh change in cloud
or hill
I should think it rank heresy to waste one moment's
or wave
thought on anything but observation and I defy the best poet in the world
to put a Spenserian stanza together without a moment's thought, or indeed
any stanza at all worth reading. Besides I am generally noting down the
quantities of Newman's superfine water-colours apparently present in the cloud
and when I get
effects, and this employment is certainly very unpoetical
home I am tired, and can do nothing. But I will send you the rest of " The
Broken Chain " if there is to be another F. 0. ; ^ if not, I would rather not write
I am in sad want
so pray send and tell me as soon as you can.
it at present
of letters— they are delicious things to banished people, it is perhaps too much
considering your engagements but I will be grateful accordingly
to ask
and will bring you some laurels from the Tomb of Virgil and some Naples
remember me kindly to Mrs. Harrison, and
All join in kind regards
soap.^
the young ladies, and believe to remain, my dear sir, most truly yours,
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J.
RUSKIN.
[The editor of the latest English version of the Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte by Bourrienne (Bentley, 1893, i. 411, and cf. iv. 876), in referring to the utterly beaten, of Napoleon, on the occasion of his submis-spelt, and indecipherable rough scrawl Mr. Ruskin was once showing to a mission, quotes the following contrary instance 'I think,' be said, taking down friend the original MSS. of several of Scott^s novels. one of them, that the most precious of all is this. It is Woodstock. Scott was writing Do you see the beautiful handthis book when the news of his ruin came upon him. writing? Now look, as I turn towards the end. Is the writing one jot less beautiful.'* Or are there more erasures than before ? This shows how a man can, and should, bear With this anecdote, cf. Ruskin's Letters to Ellis (March 25, 1881).] adversity. 2 From peak to peak, the rattling crags among. " Leaps the live thunder Childe Harold, Canto iii. stanza 92, written duriug Byron's sojourn, in company with Shelley, on the Lake of Geneva, 1816.] 3 [For ^^The Broken Chain," see Vol. II. The reference is to part v., which ^ [Of. above, p. 420.] appeared in Friendships Offering for 1842.] 1
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