“Twice five years Or less I might have seen, when first my mind With conscious pleasure opened to the charm Of words in timeful order, found them sweet For their own _sakes_, a passion and a power; And phrases pleased me chosen for delight, For pomp, or love. Oft, in the public roads Yet unfrequented, while the morning light Was yellowing the hill tops, I went abroad With a dear friend, and for the better part Of two delightful hours we strolled along By the still borders of the misty lake, Repeating favourite verses with one voice, Or conning more, as happy as the birds That round us chaunted.” =Ruskin’s Local Historic Sense.=—The awakening of the _Historic Sense_ in Ruskin appears to be always, and here is a great lesson for us, connected with places: that historic interest and æsthetic delight are one with him, is another thing to take note of. We have seen how Byron served him in this way. Again, he tells us of the “three centres of my life’s thought, Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa, which have been tutoresses of all I know and were mistresses of all I did from the first moments I entered their gates.” These came later, but Abbeville “was entrance for me into immediately healthy labour and joy.... My most intense happinesses have of course been among mountains. But for cheerful, unalloyed, unwearying pleasure, the getting sight of Abbeville on a fine summer afternoon, jumping out in the courtyard of the Hôtel de l’Europe and rushing down the street to see St Wulfran again before the sun was off the towers, are things to cherish the past for—to the end.” =Living Touch with the Past necessary.=—But Ruskin’s want of living touch with the past, except as such touch was given by the newly discovered history of a place he happened to be in, is shown in his first impressions of Rome:—