Hortus Inclusus | Page 9

to be done at the same time. It
has stranded botany and everything.
I was kept awake half of last night by drunken blackguards howling on
the bridge of the Holy Trinity in the pure half-moonlight. This is the
kind of discord I have to bear, corresponding to your uncongenial
company. But, alas! Susie, you ought at ten years old to have more
firmness, and to resolve that you won't be bored. I think I shall try to
enforce it on you as a very solemn duty not to lie to people as the
vulgar public do. If they bore you, say so, and they'll go away. That is
the right state of things.
How am I to know that I don't bore you, when I come, when you're so
civil to people you hate?
[Footnote 11: Spanish chapel in S. Maria Novella.]
* * * * *
PASS OF BOCCHETTA, 1st October (1874).

* * * * * *
All that is lovely and wonderful in the Alps may be seen without the
slightest danger, in general, and it is especially good for little girls of
eleven who can't climb, to know this--all the best views of hills are at
the bottom of them. I know one or two places indeed where there is a
grand peeping over precipices, one or two where the mountain
seclusion and strength are worth climbing to see. But all the entirely
beautiful things I could show you, Susie; only for the very highest
sublime of them sometimes asking you to endure half an hour of chaise
à porteurs, but mostly from a post-chaise or smoothest of turnpike
roads.
But, Susie, do you know, I'm greatly horrified at the penwipers of
peacocks' feathers! I always use my left-hand coat-tail, indeed, and if
only I were a peacock and a pet of yours, how you'd scold me!
Sun just coming out over sea (at Sestri), which is sighing in towards the
window, within your drive, round before the door's breadth of it,[12]
seen between two masses of acacia copse and two orange trees at the
side of the inn courtyard.
[Footnote 12: That is, within that distance of the window.--J. R.]
* * * * *
GENEVA, 19th October (1874).
How I have been neglecting you! Perhaps Joanie may have told you
that just at my last gasp of hand-work, I had to write quite an
unexpected number of letters. But poor Joanie will think herself
neglected now, for I have been stopped among the Alps by a state of
their glaciers entirely unexampled, and shall be a week after my "latest
possible" day, in getting home. It is eleven years since I was here, and
very sad to me to return, yet delightful with a moonlight paleness of the
past, precious of its kind.
I shall be at home with Joan in ten days now, God willing. I have much

to tell you, which will give you pleasure and pain; but I don't know
how much it will be--to tell you--for a little while yet, so I don't begin.
* * * * *
OXFORD, 26th October (1874).
Home at last with your lovely, most lovely, letter in my breast pocket.
I am so very grateful to you for not writing on black paper.
Oh, dear Susie, why should we ever wear black for the guests of God?
* * * * *

WHARFE IN FLOOD.
BOLTON ABBEY, 24th January, 1875.
The black rain, much as I growled at it, has let me see Wharfe in flood;
and I would have borne many days in prison to see that.
No one need go to the Alps to see wild water. Seldom unless in the
Rhine or Rhone themselves at their rapids, have I seen anything much
grander. An Alpine stream, besides, nearly always has its bed full of
loose stones, and becomes a series of humps and dumps of water
wherever it is shallow; while the Wharfe swept round its curves of
shore like a black Damascus saber, coiled into eddies of steel. At the
Strid, it had risen eight feet vertical since yesterday, sheeting the flat
rocks with foam from side to side, while the treacherous mid-channel
was filled with a succession of boiling domes of water, charged through
and through with churning white, and rolling out into the broader
stream, each like a vast sea wave bursting on a beach.
There is something in the soft and comparatively unbroken slopes of
these Yorkshire shales which must give the water a peculiar sweeping
power, for I have seen Tay and Tummel and Ness, and many a big

stream besides, savage enough, but I don't remember anything so grim
as this.
I came home to quiet tea and a black kitten called Sweep, who lapped
half