Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers by John Ruskin
page 68 of 120 (56%)
page 68 of 120 (56%)
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side pockets for books and picked up stones; and hung very low, with a
fixed side-step, which I could get off or on with the horses at the trot; and at any rise or fall of the road, relieve them, and get my own walk, without troubling the driver to think of me. 7. Thus, leaving Paris in the bright spring morning, when the Seine glittered gaily at Charenton, and the arbres de Judée were mere pyramids of purple bloom round Villeneuve-St.-Georges, one had an afternoon walk among the rocks of Fontainebleau, and next day we got early into Sens, for new lessons in its cathedral aisles, and the first saunter among the budding vines of the coteaux. I finished my plate of the Tower of Giotto, for the 'Seven Lamps,' in the old inn at Sens, which Dickens has described in his wholly matchless way in the last chapter of 'Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings'. The next day brought us to the oolite limestones at Mont Bard, and we always spent the Sunday at the Bell in Dijon. Monday, the drive of drives, through the village of Genlis, the fortress of Auxonne, and up the hill to the vine-surrounded town of Dole; whence, behold at last the limitless ranges of Jura, south and north, beyond the woody plain, and above them the 'Derniers Kochers' and the white square-set summit, worshipped ever anew. Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the first milkwort for that year; and on Tuesday, at St. Laurent, the wild lily of the valley; and on Wednesday, at Morez, gentians. And on Thursday, the _eighth or ninth_ day from Paris, days all spent patiently and well, one saw from the gained height of Jura, the great Alps unfold themselves in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and cloud. 8. Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefullest years of such travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as a study; feeling |
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