I love the eddying circling sweep, Of murmuring waters, dark and deep, The boy who wrote this last verse was father of the man that could do justice to the rich, brown, transparent water, circling and wreathing in long eddies, under the high cliff in Turner's Bolton Abbey! The closing verse in the poem goes far to explain why Ruskin became the greatest literary delineator of mountains in Europe. There is a thrill of strange delight That passes quivering o'er me, Like summer clouds before me. In these boyish poems we meet, as is usual in juvenile poetry, with many echoes from the poets in whom the boy delights. The influence of Scott is traceable everywhere, in light sunny sketching of landscape, and vivid observation of man and his works. In a fragment from a metrical journal recording the occurrences of what seems to have been Ruskin's first visit to the Continent, we find him looking from the crest of Ehrenbreitstein upon the city of Coblentz, the junction of the Rhine and the Moselle, the old stone bridge, the bridge of boats, and the rafts of pine-wood floating down the river. We climbed the crag, we scaled the ridge, On Coblentz looked adown; The tall red roofs, the long white bridge, And on the eye-like frown Of the portals of her palaces, Whence morning mist was curling gray Oh! it was lying calm and still THE BRIDGE OF BOATS. In morning's chastened glow: The multitudes were thronging by, But we were dizzily on high, And we might not one murmur hear, Nor whisper tingling on the ear, From the far depth below. 373 The bridge of boats, casting across the impetuous stream its "one dark bending line," not only pleases his eye, but suggests a few of those moral reflections to which boy minstrels are prone. The feeble bridge that bends below Where strength of stone were all in vain. The descriptive references to the felling of the trees for the raft, which is to go like a sailing island from the mountain to the sea, are picturesque and felicitous. The Schwartzwald pine hath shed its green, But not at autumn's frown; A sharper winter stripped them there- The peasant, on some Alpine brow, Hath cut the root and lopped the bough; The eagle heard the echoing fall, And soared away to his high eyrie; The chamois gave his warning call, And higher on the mountain tall The following description of a forest-glade is still more carefully elaborated, and still more boldly imaginative. "Twas in the hollow of a forest dim, Where the low breezes sang their evening hymn, Whose leaves had many voices, weak or wild; Of a great nation, bowed in misery; The deep vast silence of the winter's wood And dew, that thrilled the flowers with full delight, And richly there the panting earth put on A wreathed robe of blossoms wild and wan: The passioned primrose blessed the morning gale, Can these lines fail to remind any reader of Endymion of the delicate fingering of Keats? The lines on the voices of the forest leaves are worthy of any poet, and are wonderful for a poet of seventeen. It has often been remarked that the poetry of happy boyhood is apt to be sad, and there is in Ruskin's no lack of melancholy tones, frequently with something in them to remind us of Byron, yet never approaching either the sentimentality or the theatricality of Byron's stage manner. The following is too manifestly sincere, too quietly beautiful, to have been written by his lordship, and yet there is something in the lines that reminds one of Byron: THE LAST SMILE. She sat beside me yesternight, With lip and eye so sweetly smiling, ON LIBERTY. So full of soul, of life, of light, That she had almost made me gay, Had almost charmed the thought away 375 Quite unmistakably, in the following Spenserian stanza, descriptive of a dream, is heard the music of Shelley: And yet it was a strange dim dream: On the weight of the waves; I could feel them come, And the strength of their darkness drifted and drew As the west wind carries a fragment rent From a thunder-cloud's uppermost battlement. But though his early verses bear witness to his enthusiastic study of the poets of his time, they are by no means void of true originality. Not only do they display powers of description hardly paralleled by any poet of his years, but reveal no ordinary power of thought and insight, and are sometimes. curiously prophetic of his career. It is startling to find, in a poem written when he was seventeen, lines which might serve as texts for chapters, almost for volumes, written when his fame had made the tour of the world. There's but one liberty of heart and soul, Of gentle feeling, passioned, though subdued, To weave their bonds of bliss, their chains divine, And keep the heaven-illumined heart they fill In the sole freedom that can please the good, A mild and mental, unfelt servitude. Several of the poems were composed when he had attained the ripe age of twenty-five or twenty-six, and in these can be discerned not merely the prophecy of his power, but not a little of its manifestation. This remark applies particularly to descriptive passages on the Alps, which read like pieces of Ruskinian prose finely versified. He looks toward the mountains from Marengo, and speaks: The glory of the cloud-without its wane; Of dying generations vanisheth, Less cognizable than clouds; and dynasties Less glorious and more feeble than the array Of your frail glaciers, unregarded rise, Totter, and vanish. Some lines on Mont Blanc, when he revisited it in 1845, have a solemn tenderness befitting a psalm or hymn. Oh, mount beloved! mine eyes again Oh, mount beloved! thy frontier waste And reverent desire. Having referred to the worship which God "wins" from the lowlier creatures, "the partridge on her purple nest, the |