English Prose | Page 9

he speak the phraseology of I know not what
David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on

a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the
sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men
of talents and character they chance to see,--painfully recollecting the
exact words they spoke; afterward, when they come into the point of
view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them
and are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words
as good when occasion comes. So was it with us, so will it be, if we
proceed. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong
man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new
perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be
as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.
And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far off remembering
of the intuition: That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to
say it, is this: When good is near you, when you have life in
yourself,--it is not by any known or appointed way; you shall not
discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man;
you shall not hear any name;--the way, the thought, the good, shall be
wholly strange and new. It shall exclude all other being. You take the
way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its fugitive
ministers. There shall be no fear in it. Fear and hope are alike beneath it.
It asks nothing. There is somewhat low even in hope. We are then in
vision. There is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy.
The soul is raised over passion. It seeth identity and eternal causation.
It is a perceiving that Truth and Right are. Hence it becomes a
Tranquillity out of the knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of
nature; the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; vast intervals of time, years,
centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay that
former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present
and will always all circumstances, and what is called life and what is
called death.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: From Essays, First Series, 1841; the second half of the
essay has here been omitted.]

EARLY EDUCATION AT HERNE HILL[2]

JOHN RUSKIN
When I was about four years old my father found himself able to buy
the lease of a house on Herne Hill, a rustic eminence four miles south
of the "Standard in Cornhill"; of which the leafy seclusion remains, in
all essential points of character, unchanged to this day: certain Gothic
splendours, lately indulged in by our wealthier neighbours, being the
only serious innovations; and these are so graciously concealed by the
fine trees of their grounds, that the passing viator remains unappalled
by them; and I can still walk up and down the piece of road between the
Fox tavern and the Herne Hill station, imagining myself four years old.
Our house was the northernmost of a group which stand accurately on
the top or dome of the hill, where the ground is for a small space level,
as the snows are, (I understand), on the dome of Mont Blanc; presently
falling, however, in what may be, in the London clay formation,
considered a precipitous slope, to our valley of Chamouni (or of
Dulwich) on the east; and with a softer descent into Cold Harbor lane
on the west: on the south, no less beautifully declining to the dale of the
Effra, (doubtless shortened from Effrena, signifying the "Unbridled"
river; recently, I regret to say, bricked over for the convenience of Mr.
Biffin, chemist, and others); while on the north, prolonged indeed with
slight depression some half mile or so, and receiving, in the parish of
Lambeth, the chivalric title of "Champion Hill," it plunges down at last
to efface itself in the plains of Peckham, and the rural barbarism of
Goose Green.
The group, of which our house was the quarter, consisted of two
precisely similar partner-couples of houses, gardens and all to match;
still the two highest blocks of buildings seen from Norwood on the
crest of the ridge; so that the house itself, three-storied, with garrets
above, commanded, in those comparatively smokeless days, a very
notable view from its garret windows, of the