“The world talks of the article in its usual way.  I was at Carlyle’s last night....  He said that in writing to your father as to subject he had told him that when Solomon’s temple was building it was credibly reported that at least 10,000 sparrows sitting on the trees round declared that it was entirely wrong—­quite contrary to received opinion—­hopelessly condemned by public opinion, etc.  Nevertheless it got finished and the sparrows flew away and began to chirp in the same note about something else.”

CHAPTER III

THE LIMESTONE ALPS (1863)

Our hermit among the Alps of Savoy differed in one respect from his predecessors.  They, for the most part, saw nothing in the rocks and stones around them except the prison walls of their seclusion; he could not be within constant sight of the mountains without thinking over the wonders of their scenery and structure.  And it was well for him that it could be so.  The terrible depression of mind which his social and philanthropic work had brought on, found a relief in the renewal of his old mountain-worship.  After sending off the last of his Fraser papers, in which, when the verdict had twice gone against him, he tried to show cause why sentence should not be passed, the strain was at its severest.  He felt, as few others not directly interested felt, the sufferings of the outcast in English slums and Savoyard hovels; and heard the cry of the oppressed in Poland and in Italy:  and he had been silenced.  What could he do but, as he said in the letters to Norton, “lay his head to the very ground,” and try to forget it all among the stones and the snows?

He wandered about geologizing, and spent a while at Talloires on the Lake of Annecy, where the old Abbey had been turned into an inn, and one slept in a monk’s cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery, St. Bernard of Menthon’s memory haunting the place, and St. Germain’s cave close by in the rocks above.  At the end of May he came back to England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Institution.  The subject he chose was “The Stratified Alps of Savoy.”

At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in papers embedded in Transactions of various societies.  Professor Alphonse Favre’s great work did not appear until 1867, and the “Mechanismus der Gebirgsbildung” of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English public the subject was a fresh one.  To Ruskin it was familiar:  he had been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer and note-book.  In the field he had compared Studer’s meagre