Hardly had I become interested in my drawing when Ruskin decided to move on to Chamounix, where we might hope to get really to work.  When the first sublime and overpowering impression of Chamounix and the majesty and gloom of its narrow valley wore off, it began to oppress me, and long before we got away I felt as if I were in a huge grave.  The geological interest was great, and the sublimity overpowering.  But to my mind sublimity does not suffice for art; the beautiful must predominate, and of the beautiful there is little in the valley.  The sublime rendered on a small scale is not satisfactory; the beautiful loses nothing by reduction.

I was disappointed in the High Alps,—­they left me cold; and after visiting the points of view Turner had taken drawings from, we went up to the Montanvert, where Ruskin wished me to paint for him a wreath of Alpine rose.  We found the rose growing luxuriantly against a huge granite boulder, a pretty natural composition, and I set to work on it with great satisfaction, for botanical painting always interested me.  Ruskin sat and watched me work, and expressed his surprise at my facility of execution of details and texture, saying that, of the painters he knew, only Millais had so great facility of execution.  We were living at the little hotel of the Montanvert, and he was impatient to get back to the better accommodation of the valley hotels; so that when the roses and the rocks were done we went back, the completion of the picture being left for later study.  From Paris, in the ensuing winter, I sent it to Ruskin, the distance being made of the actual view down the valley of Chamounix; and he wrote me a bitter condemnation of it, as a disappointment; for he said that he “had expected to see the Alpine roses overhanging an awful chasm,” etc. (an expectation he should have given expression to earlier), and found it very commonplace and uninteresting.  So it was, and I burnt it after the fashion of the “Bed of Ferns.”  As Rowse said of him later, “he wanted me to hold the brush while he painted.”  But our ideas clashed continually, and what he wanted was impossible,—­to make me see with his eyes; and so we came to great disappointment in the end.

I was very much interested in his old guide, Coutet, with whom I had many climbs.  He liked to go with me, he said, because I was very sure-footed and could go wherever he did.  He was a famous crystal-hunter, and many of the rarest specimens in the museum of Geneva were of his finding.  There was one locality of which only he knew, where the rock was pitted with small turquoises like a plum pudding, and I begged him to tell me where it was.  There is a superstition amongst the crystal-hunters that to tell where the crystals are found brings bad luck, and he would never tell me in so many words; but one day, after my importunity, I saw him leveling his alpenstock on the ground in a very curious way, sighting along it and correcting the direction, and when he had finished he said, as