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On The Enjoyment Of Unpleasant Places
by
[Note 4: We are provocative of beauty. Compare again, Fra Lippo Lippi, vs. 215 et seq.
“Or say there’s beauty with no soul at all–
(I never saw it–put the case the same–)
If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents:
That’s somewhat: and you’ll find the soul you have missed,
Within yourself, when you return him thanks.”]
[Note 5: Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill. Jacques Callot was an eminent French artist of the XVII century, born at Nancy in 1592, died 1635. Matthaeus and Paul Brill were two celebrated Dutch painters. Paul, the younger brother of Matthaeus, was born about 1555, and died in 1626. His development in landscape-painting was remarkable. Gilles Sadeler, born at Antwerp 1570, died at Prague 1629, a famous artist, and nephew of two well-known engravers. He was called the “Phoenix of Engraving.”]
[Note 6: Dick Turpin. Dick Turpin was born in Essex, England, and was originally a butcher. Afterwards he became a notorious highwayman, and was finally executed for horse-stealing, 10 April 1739. He and his steed Black Bess are well described in W. H. Ainsworth’s Rookwood, and in his Ballads.]
[Note 7: The Trossachs. The word means literally, “bristling country.” A beautifully romantic tract, beginning immediately to the east of Loch Katrine in Perth, Scotland. Stevenson’s statement, “if a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with harmonious figures,” refers to Walter Scott, and more particularly to the Lady of the Lake (1810).]
[Note 8: I am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased without trees. Notice the kind of country he begins to describe in the next paragraph. Is there really any contradiction in his statements?]
[Note 9: Like David before Saul. David charmed Saul out of his sadness, according to the Biblical story, not with nature, but with music. See I Samuel XVI. 14-23. But in Browning’s splendid poem, Saul (1845), nature and music are combined in David’s inspired playing.
“And I first played the tune all our sheep know,” etc.]
[Note 10: The sermon in stones. See the beginning of the second act of As You Like It, where the exiled Duke says,
“And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.”
It is not at all certain that Shakspere used the word “sermons” here in the modern sense; he very likely meant merely discourses, conversations.]
[Note 11: Wuthering Heights. The well-known novel (1847) by Emily Bronte (1818-1848) sister of the more famous Charlotte Bronte. The “little summer scene” Stevenson mentions, is in Chapter XXIV.]
[Note 12: A solitary, spectacled stone-breaker. To the pedestrian or cyclist, no difference between Europe and America is more striking than the comparative excellence of the country roads. The roads in Europe, even in lonely and remote districts, where one may travel for hours without seeing a house, are usually in perfect condition, hard, white and absolutely smooth. The slightest defect or abrasion is immediately repaired by one of these stone-breakers Stevenson mentions, a solitary individual, his eyes concealed behind large green goggles, to protect them from the glare and the flying bits of stone.]
[Note 13: Ashamed and cold. An excellent example of what Ruskin called “the pathetic fallacy.”]
[Note 14: The foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. Cf. Tennyson, In Memoriam, LXXII:–
“With blasts that blow the poplar white.”]
[Note 15: Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage. The passage Stevenson quotes is in Book VII of The Prelude, called Residence in London.]
[Note 16: Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished marvel by the Rhine. This great cathedral, generally regarded as the most perfect Gothic church in the world, was begun in 1248, and was not completed until 1880, seven years after Stevenson wrote this essay.]
[Note 17: In a golden zone like Apollo’s. The Greek God Apollo, later identified with Helios, the Sun-god. The twin towers of Cologne Cathedral are over 500 feet high, so that the experience described here is quite possible.]