Papers of the Manchester Literary Club (1906)
by Manchester Literary Club (9780217528764)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IMPRESSIONS OF SWITZERLAND. By Laurence Clay. ''PHERE would appear to exist, as part of the phenomena of our mysterious human nature, mental planes upon which we are liable, amongst other things, to the obsession of our usual general sense of proportion and value and their refinements, or we come under the domination of influences under which we appear to run amok amongst pre-conceived notions and conventionalities. We at least sometimes do unaccountable things. What for instance, dire enough, if my post-haste trip (unblessed word ) through and over and around the sublimities of Switzerland, were in its conditions and essence, a lapsus mentis, and " all a wonder and a wild desire" alien to the calm of unruffled reason, an outburst of primeval curiosity, or an overmastering predatory instinct, the beast working out in the man, Ayrian though he be. Perhaps I but ran amok in a refined, superior kind of way. Sure am I that I should be ashamed, were I confronted with the shade of Ruskin, to have to confess I had "done" Switzerland in a fortnight. Apart from the poverty of the language, my ghostly straits could not prompt reasons enough to give any colour to a defence of such conduct. I defend it not, but feel like the dog discovered to have eaten a stolen meal, guilty in every curve, one's sole thought for comfort "I've had it, nothing can obviate that, now punish me if it be your will." Thus have I cried ' Peccavi, ' assumed your reproof, and now pass to tell over as sweet morsels of memory and reflection, some of the impressions, flash-like impressions perhaps, that I gathered. One fore-word more, however. Ruskin (and to quote him is surely excusable in this connection), in one of his works, refers to a law of compensation under which the feelings of "wonder and d...

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