“When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to complete my course of education; and the change was a very happy one to me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them, as we descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance into heaven; and the three years of my life there were spent in a perpetual sense of exaltation, as if from a draught of delicious wine, at the presence of Nature in all her awful loveliness. You will think, perhaps, that I must have been a poet, from this early sensibility to Nature. But my lot was not so happy as that. A poet pours forth his song and believes in the listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be floated sooner or later. But the poet’s sensibility without his voice — the poet’s sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the Sunnybank, when the noonday light sparkles on the water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human eye—this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the society of one’s fellow-men.”

Adapted from ‘The Lifted Veil’ in George Eliot. Essays, miscellanies, and poems, Boston: Aldine Books Publishing Co., 1883, p. 432. The word ‘Sunnybank’ substituted from ‘sunny bank’

I too when 16 years of age, in the course of education, gazed on the mountains, much smaller than the Alps, and I descended to my ‘Jura’. It is as the poetic narrator described it.  I say…

The poet’s sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears in Sunnybank, when the noonday light sparkles on the water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human eye—this dumb passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the society of one’s fellow-men.

Image Source: Orderinchaos, ‘Sign at the entrance to Sunnybank on Mains Road, near Beenleigh Road, Sunnybank, Queensland,’ 10 August 2018.