Footnote 5, Chapter 13, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. 0n this passage see Pierre Fontaney, "Ruskin and Paradise Regained," Victorinan Studies 12 (1969), 347-356, which reads Ruskin's images as archetypes. For example, the river itself is "a symbol of God's creative power . . ., gathering all fulfillments -- youth, bliss, eternity -- into itself . . ., a river indeed 'spiritualized' into analogy with the 'pure river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the Throne of God and of the Lamb'.... the Rhone, the jewel, is also a figure of Paradise regained." In Ruskin's first publication, when he queried the cause of the Rhone's extraordinary perspicuousness as it flows through Geneva, he may already have had in mind the archetype of the city of God: "It issues from the lake perfectly pure, and flows through the streets of Geneva so transparent, that the bottom can be seen twenty feet below the surface, yet so blue, that you might imagine it to be a solution of indigo" (I, 192).
Last modified December 2000