On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and LiteratureRuskin, John
General
On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature
Ruskin, John
Art; Essays; Literature
beautiful episcopalian repartee with which it was terminated.
11. Very seriously, in all such public duties, Mr. Harrison was a person
of rarest quality and worth; absolutely disinterested in his zeal,
unwearied in exertion, always ready, never tiresome, never absurd;
bringing practical sense, kindly discretion, and a most wholesome
element of good-humored, but incorruptible honesty, into everything his
hand found to do. Everybody respected, and the best men sincerely
regarded him, and I think those who knew most of the world were always
the first to acknowledge his fine faculty of doing exactly the right
thing to exactly the right point--and so pleasantly. In private life, he
was to me an object of quite special admiration, in the quantity of
pleasure he could take in little things; and he very materially modified
many of my gravest conclusions, as to the advantages or mischiefs of
modern suburban life. To myself scarcely any dwelling-place and duty in
this world would have appeared (until, perhaps, I had tried them) less
eligible for a man of sensitive and fanciful mind than the New Road,
Camberwell Green, and the monotonous office work in Bridge Street. And
to a certain extent, I am still of the same mind as to these matters,
and do altogether, and without doubt or hesitation, repudiate the
existence of New Road and Camberwell Green in general, no less than the
condemnation of intelligent persons to a routine of clerk's work broken
only by a three weeks' holiday in the decline of the year. On less
lively, fanciful, and amiable persons than my old friend, the New Road
and the daily desk do verily exercise a degrading and much to be
regretted influence. But Mr. Harrison brought the freshness of pastoral
simplicity into the most faded corners of the Green, lightened with his
cheerful heart the most leaden hours of the office, and gathered during
his three weeks' holiday in the neighborhood, suppose, of Guildford,
Gravesend, Broadstairs, or Rustington, more vital recreation and
speculative philosophy than another man would have got on the grand
tour.
12. On the other hand, I, who had nothing to do all day but what I
liked, and could wander at will among all the best beauties of the
globe--nor that without sufficient power to see and to feel them, was
habitually a discontented person, and frequently a weary one; and the
reproachful thought which always rose in my mind when in that
unconquerable listlessness of surfeit from excitement I found myself
unable to win even a momentary pleasure from the fairest scene, was
always: "If but Mr. Harrison were here instead of me!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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