about the lagunes just before. Of course, the thing to be done is to catch — and use - and guide the rain - when first Heaven sends it. For 1200 years, the Venetians have been fighting vainly with the Brenta and its slime. Every wave of it is just so much gold — running idly into the sea, and dragging the ruin of kingdoms down with it. Catch it when it first falls, and the arid north side of the Alps would be one garden, up to 7000 feet above the plain, and the waters clear and lovely in what portion of them was allowed to go down to the plain for its cultivation. Not a drop should be allowed to find its way into the sea from Lombardy, except as much as would make the Po navigable as far at least as Pavia, or, better, Casale; and the minor rivers constant with clear water in one fifth of their present widths of bed. . . .

Omar is very deep and lovely. But the universe is not a shadow show, nor a game, but a battle of weary wounds and useless cries, and I am now in the temper that Omar would have been in, if somebody always stood by him to put mud into his wine, or break his amphora. You don't quite yet understand the humor of thirsty souls, who have seen their last amphora broken and "del suo vino farsi in terra lago.'

The Valais plan, however, is only the beginning of a bigger one, for making people old-fashioned. The more I see of your new fashions the less I like them. I, a second time (lest the first impression should have been too weak), was fated to come from Venice to Verona with an American family - Father and mother and two girls presumably rich girls, 15 and 18. I never before conceived the misery of wretches who had spent all their lives in trying to gratify themselves. It was a little warm warmer than was entirely luxurious but nothing in the least harmful. They moaned and fidgeted and frowned and

1 "Delle mie vene farsi in terra lago." Purgatorio, v. 84.

puffed and stretched and fanned, and ate lemons, and smelt bottles, and covered their faces, and tore the cover off again, and had no one thought or feeling during five hours of travelling in the most noble part of all the world, except what four poor beasts would have had in their den in a menagerie, being dragged about on a hot day. Add to this misery every form of possible vulgarity, in methods of doing and saying the common things they said and did. I never yet saw humanity so degraded (allowing for external circumstances of every possible advantage). Given wealth, attainable education, and the inheritance of 18 centuries of Christianity, and 10 of noble Paganism; and this is your result- by means of “Liberty."

I am oppressed with work that I can't do, but must soon close now. Send me a line to Lugano. Love to you all. Ever your affectionate

J. R.

DENMARK HILL, 7th August, 1870. MY DEAREST CHARLES, -Your letter and the photographs, which are delightful, arrived last night — it is better to send some little word of answer at once to your two questions about Turner. His, "I have been cruelly treated," was reported to me by his friend Mr. Griffith (who was much with him before his death) as having been said one day almost without consciousness of speaking aloud, as he was looking sorrowfully at the pictures then exhibiting at Pallmall -from his gallery - everybody admiring them too late. The other saying came from an unquestionable quarterMr. Kingsley of Cambridge - Charles Kingsley's cousin was in Turner's own gallery with him. They came to the "Crossing the Brook". a piece of paint out of the sky, as large as a 4a piece, was lying on the floor. Kingsley picked it up, and said, "Have you noticed this?" "No," said Turner. "How can you look at the picture and see it so injured?"

said Kingsley. "What does it matter?” answered Turner, "the only use of the thing is to recall the impression." Of course it was false, but he was then thinking of himself only, having long given up the thought of being cared for by the public.

It was very curious your reading Ste. Beuve's Virgil with me. You will have seen by the lectures already that I feel as strongly as he, and much more strongly. (I like Ste. Beuve much, and see why you spoke of his style as admirable; but he is altogether shallow, and therefore may easily keep his agitation at ripple-level. Please compare his translation of Homer's Eolus at p. 204 with mine in Queen of Air, p. 22, and see how he has missed the mythic sense of the feasting, and put in "viandes savoreuses" out of his head, not understanding why Homer made the house misty.) But for Virgil, all you say of him is true — but through and under all that there is a depth and perfectness that no man has reached but he; — just as that Siena arabesque, though in a bad style, is insuperable — so Virgil, in (not a bad — but) a courtly and derivative style, has sterling qualities the most rare.

Thank you for writing what you had told me, but what I am only too glad to have written, of Cervantes. I will look at the two parts carefully.

Yes, I'll write often now, little words to tell you what I am feeling, and trying to do. Loving memory to you all. Ever your grateful,

[DENMARK HILL] 3rd April, '71.

I have had much disturbed work at Oxford, and coming home a few days ago for rest, my poor old Annie dies suddenly, and I've just buried her to-day, within (sight of!) her old master's grave. It is very wonderful to me that those two, who loved me so much, should not be able to see me any more.1

1 Anne or Annie, as she was indifferently called, was an important and characteristic member of the Denmark Hill household, — one of the wheels on which it ran its steady course. In 1873 Ruskin wrote of her in Fors Clavigera, Letter xxviii, words which he repeated twelve years later in the first number of Præterita, and which, because of my pleasant memories of her keen inspection and her kind old-fashioned attentions to me as her master's friend when I was at Denmark Hill, I am glad to reprint here:

At Oxford, having been Professor a year and a half, I thought it time to declare open hostilities with Kensington, and requested the Delegates to give me a room for a separate school on another system. They went with me altogether, and I am going to furnish my new room with coins, books, catalogued drawings and engravings, and your Greek vases; the mere fitting will cost me three or four hundred pounds. Then I'm going to found a Teachership under the Professorship, on condition of the teaching being on such and such principles, and this whole spring I must work hard to bring all my force well to bear, and show what I can do.

1

"Among the people whom one must miss out of one's life, dead, or worse than dead, by the time one is past fifty, I can only say for my own part, that the one I practically and truly miss most next to my father and mother . . is this Anne, my father's nurse and mine. From her girlhood to her old age, the entire ability of her life was given to serving us. She had a natural gift and speciality for doing disagreeable things, not things disagreeable to others, but those which others found disagreeable to do for themselves. She was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills instead of her own, and seeking other people's good instead of her own." Anne was no saint, but few saints have deserved as she did such a tribute.

1 Vases which I had obtained in Italy for him.

acres of rock and moor, a streamlet, and I think on the whole the finest view I know in Cumberland or Lancashire with the sunset visible over the

same.

-

The house small old - damp and smoky chimneyed-somebody must help me get to rights.

MELROSE, 24th September, 1871. I shall in all probability be fairly settled in the house in November, for one of the reasons of my getting it is that I may fully command the winter sunsets, in clear sky instead of losing the dead of day in the three o'clock fog of London. Meantime, I am very thankful for that sense of rest, which you feel also; but it is greatly troubled and darkened and lowered by the horrible arrangement of there being women in the world as well as mountains and stars and lambs, and what else one might have been at peace with — but for those other creatures!

What a lovely Tintoret that one at Dresden must be! - I never saw it; and what a gigantic, healthy, Sea-Heaven of a life he had, compared to this sickly, muddy, half eau sucrée and half-poisoned wine which is my River of Life; and yet how vain his also, except to you and me. I am writing a word or two of his work as true "wealth" opposed to French lithographs and the like, in the preface to second volume of my revised works, Munera Pulveris.

[DENMARK HILL] 4th January, 1872. I have been so singularly, even for me, depressed and weak since the beginning of the year, that I could not write to you. One of the distinctest sources of this depression is my certitude that I ought now to wear spectacles; but much also depends on the sense of loss of that infinitude of love my mother had for me, and the bitter pity for its extinction.

I much delight in this coin of Frederick, and very solemnly and with my whole heart prefer it to the Hercules. I should even prefer my own profile to the Greek Hercules, though mine has the awfullest marks of folly, irresolution and disease. But Frederick and I had both of us, about the worst education that men could get for money, and both had passed through rough times which partly conquered us -being neither of us, certainly not I, made of the best metal, even had we been well brought up. One of the quaintest things in your last letter was your fixing in your search for bad epithets for Frederick on "Unsociable." And yet you love

me.

But not to continue so insolent a comparison any longer, take the one instance of Frederick's domestic and moral temper, that having been in danger of death under the will almost sentence of a father partly insane, he yet never accuses, but in all things justifies, and evidently reverences that father, through life.

28th.

I have the registered letter, and will pack the "Slaver" forthwith.

It is right that it should be in America,1 and I am well pleased in every way, and always

Your lovingest,

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, Oxford,
Easter Sunday, '72.

I left my Denmark Hill study to go back no more on Thursday, and have passed my Good Friday and Saturday here, quite alone, finding, strangely, one of my Father's diaries for my solace, giving account of all our continental journies, from the time I was six years old, when he and my mother, and I, and a cat, whom I made a friend at Paris, and an old French man-chambermaid, were all very happy (yet not so much in degree as completeness) at Paris my Father some twelve years younger than I am now.