162 THE JOURNEYMAN. 



much cause for being grateful also/ He has a deep 

 affection for Miller, and a pride in his friend. ' You 

 complain, my friend, of melancholy. Had I such a heart 

 as yours, I think I could be happy even in grief. It is 

 of a gentler and more delicate cast than I had imagined, 

 and I am glad of it.' 



Occasionally Ross introduces a similitude so apt and 

 so beautiful that we feel keenly how real, how fine, if 

 slender, was his vein of genius. Remarking that all 

 who know him think well of him, he proceeds with his 

 usual self-depreciation to account for the fact : ' All 

 these men only see me in part, and (for such is the 

 nature of all earthly things when viewed from a distance) 

 what they do see of me appears other than what it is. The 

 clouds which so gloriously encircle the setting sun, and 

 whose beauty in description no comparison can heighten, 

 are but wreaths of watery vapour ; and the distant hill, 

 though its azure hue vies in depth and beauty with that 

 of the cloudless firmament, is a mass of rock and earth, 

 half covered with a stunted vegetation. What am I in 

 reality? What is my heart? a cold, vicious thing, 

 devoid of energy, affection, and peace/ This is a far 

 deeper thought than Thomson's about the enchantment 

 of distance. Mr Ruskin expands what is essentially the 

 same idea as the poor consumptive house-painter's into 

 one of the most eloquent passages in his works ;* but 



* ' Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as 

 far away ? Nay, not so. Look at the clouds, and watch the delicate 

 sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the rounded lustre of their mag- 

 nificent rolling. They were meant to be beheld far away ; they were 

 shaped for their place, high above your head ; approach them, and they 

 fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of thunderous 

 vapour. Look at the crest of the Alp, from the far-away plains over 

 which its light is cast, whence human souls have communion with it 

 by their myriads. The child looks up to it in the dawn, and the 

 husbandman in the burden and heat of the day, and the old man in the 

 going down of the sun, and it is to them all as the celestial city on the 



