Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of
the brain? It is a sort of congestion, perhaps,
that leads the invalid, when all goes well, to face
the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness.
It is certainly congestion that makes night hideous
with visions, all the chambers of a many-storeyed
caravanserai, haunted with vociferous nightmares,
and many wakeful people come down late for breakfast
in the morning. Upon that theory the cynic may
explain the whole affair—exhilaration,
nightmares, pomp of tongue and all. But, on the
other hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may
itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for
the two effects are strangely similar; and the frame
of mind of the invalid upon the Alps is a sort of
intermittent youth, with periods of lassitude.
The fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in
these parts; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere
else.
CHAPTER XIII—ROADS—1873
No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure
in a single drawing, over which he can sit a whole
quiet forenoon, and so gradually study himself into
humour with the artist, than he can ever extract from
the dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions
that send him, weary and stupefied, out of some famous
picture-gallery. But what is thus admitted with
regard to art is not extended to the (so-called) natural
beauties no amount of excess in sublime mountain outline
or the graces of cultivated lowland can do anything,
it is supposed, to weaken or degrade the palate.
We are not at all sure, however, that moderation,
and a regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery,
are not healthful and strengthening to the taste;
and that the best school for a lover of nature is
not to the found in one of those countries where there
is no stage effect—nothing salient or sudden,—but
a quiet spirit of orderly and harmonious beauty pervades
all the details, so that we can patiently attend to
each of the little touches that strike in us, all
of them together, the subdued note of the landscape.
It is in scenery such as this that we find ourselves
in the right temper to seek out small sequestered
loveliness. The constant recurrence of similar
combinations of colour and outline gradually forces
upon us a sense of how the harmony has been built
up, and we become familiar with something of nature’s
mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your
’rural voluptuary,’—not to remain
awe-stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not to sit
deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, but day
by day to teach himself some new beauty—to
experience some new vague and tranquil sensation that
has before evaded him. It is not the people
who ’have pined and hungered after nature many
a year, in the great city pent,’ as Coleridge
said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed
of himself; it is not those who make the greatest
progress in this intimacy with her, or who are most
