Ruskin john somervell robert (1 risultati)

Titlepage sl. marked in outer margin, final leaf a little oxidised. Bound into neat modern wrappers with portion of orig. wrapper retained as label. 78pp. Ottley 4854. Wise (Ruskin) 314. Scarce in commerce. Impressed by the zeal of Somervell's opposition to the development of the railway through the Lake District, Ruskin assisted his friend both by writing the nine-page preface to this pamphlet and introducing Somervell to his extensive network of correspondents. Ruskin's support did not arise from any personal desire or passionate interest in the subject at hand, but more from the 'temperate mastery' of Somervell's argument. As he writes in his opening statement, 'I am far less interested than my friend in this local and limited resistance to the elsewhere fatally victorious current of modern folly, cruelty, and ruin'. He continues, 'When the frenzy of avarice is daily drowning our sailors, suffocating our miners, poisoning our children, and blasting the cultivable surface of England into a tree-less waste of ashes, - What does it really matter whether a flock of sheep, more or less, be driven from the slopes of Helvellyn, or the little pool or Thirlmere filled with shale, or a few wild blossoms of St. John's vale lost to the coronal of English Spring? But it is no less my duty, in the cause of those to whom the sweet landscapes of England are yet precious, and to whom they may yet teach what they taught me, in early boyhood, and would still, if I had it now to learn, - it is my duty to plead with what earnestness I may, that these sacred sibylline books may be redeemed from perishing.' In the end, due either to Somervell's campaign or, more likely, the lack of any economic benefit to the proposed projects, no railway line was built into the centre of the Lake District. (Albritton, Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin's Lake District.) An eight line extract from The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1844, precedes the work: 'The age culls simples / Will a broad clown's back turned broadly to the glory of the stars.'.…