Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/101

 interest even in the accessories of his mistress's charms. How Ruskin's passion for nature was developed by his surroundings may be learnt from many of his most interesting reminiscences. But the surroundings worked upon innate predispositions which must have been almost unique. He speaks in Modern Painters of his 'intense joy, mingled with awe,' when his nurse took him to Friar's Crag on Derwentwater. It was 'comparable only to the joy of being near a noble and kind mistress'—and equally inexplicable. Long afterwards he tells us how, as a boy, he would pass entire days rambling on 'Cumberland hillsides or staring at the lines of surf on a low sand,' and traces his whole power of judging in art to the habit thus acquired. In this quality, and in this alone, he was, he thinks, remarkable as a child. Most children have a certain taste for ponds and rocks, as offering romantic chances of dirt and danger, and as the habitat of things catchable, and partly, if they are imaginative, as probable haunts of pirates and Robinson Crusoes. Those are surely rare who, as Ruskin tells us of himself, found a 'strange delight' in getting a 'land-line cutting against the sky.' Wordsworth was another recorded instance, and Ruskin himself compares this