gs
for his plates. He was going to begin with the geology and botany of
Chamouni, and work through the Alps, eastward.

At Chamouni they had the good fortune to meet with Joseph Coutet, a
superannuated guide, whom they engaged to accompany the eager but
inexperienced mountaineer. Coutet was one of those men of natural
ability and kindliness whose friendship is worth more than much
intercourse with worldly celebrities, and for many years afterwards
Ruskin had the advantage of his care--of something more than mere
attendance. At any rate, under such guidance, he could climb where he
pleased, free from the feeling that people at home were anxious about
him.

He was not unadventurous in his scramblings, but with no ambition to get
to the top of everything. He wanted to observe the aspects of
mountain-form; and his careful outlines, slightly coloured, as his
manner then was, and never aiming at picturesque treatment, record the
structure of the rocks and the state of the snow with more than
photographic accuracy. A photograph often confuses the eye with
unnecessary detail; these drawings seized the leading lines, the
important features, the interesting points. For example, in his
Matterhorn (a drawing of 1849), as Whymper remarks in "Scrambles among
the Alps," there are particulars noted which the mere sketcher neglects,
but the climber finds out, on closer intercourse, to be the essential
facts of the mountain's anatomy. All this is not picture-making, but it
is a valuable contribution and preliminary to criticism.

From Chamouni this year they went to Simplon, and met J.D. Forbes, the
geologist, whose "viscous theory" of glaciers Ruskin adopted and
defended with warmth later on, and to the Bell' Alp, long before it had
been made a place of popular resort by Professor Tyndall's notice. The
"Panorama of the Simplon from the Bell' Alp" is to be found in the St.
George's (Ruskin) Museum at Sheffield, as a record of his
draughtsmanship in this period. Thence to Zermatt with Osborne Gordon;
Zermatt, too, unknown to the fashionable tourist, and innocent of hotel
luxuries. It is curious that, at first sight, he did not care for the
Matterhorn. It was entirely unlike his ideal of mountains. It was not at
all like Cumberland. But in a very few years he had come to love the
Alps for their own sake, and we find him regretting at Ambleside the
colour and light of Switzerland, the mountain glory which our humbler
scenery cannot matc