I received one or two letters from Ruskin in the summer and autumn of 1863, but there followed a long interval without a word. His feeling in regard to our war, and his want of sympathy with those whose hearts were engaged in it, checked for the time the desire for the interchange of letters. It was a period in which a great change took place in his own life, to which, indeed, he made no reference when, after a ten months' silence, he sent to me the brief and bitter letter which follows.

[DENMARK HILL] 6th August, 1864. MY DEAR NORTON, - The truth is I am quite too lazy, with a deathful sort of laziness, to write I hate the feeling of having to drive pen up and down lines, quite unconquerably, and I have really nothing to say. I am busy with Greek and Egyptian mythology, and all sorts of problems in life and death- and your American business is so entirely horrible to me that, somehow, it cuts you off from all possibility of my telling you any of my thoughts. It is just as if I saw you washing your hands in blood, and whistling - and sentimentalizing to me. I know you don't know what you are about and are just as good and dear as ever you were - but I simply can't write to you while you are living peaceably in Bedlam. I am getting my house in order, and perhaps shall die as soon as I've done it but I'm a little better. When I'm quite settled, I will write to you with some general facts.

property in houses and land, the whole of which estate the elder had accumulated by industry and sagacity in legitimate business. He was not only an entirely honest merchant, but a man of great generosity, of shrewd judgment, and of persevering culture in poetry and art. His erratic genius of a son, on whom he had lavished his wealth and his anxieties, had long parted from him in ideas of religion as well as economics. But the affection between them remained unimpaired."

The loss of his father was a graver calamity to Ruskin than a similar loss is to most men of forty-five years old. Although of late he had lived much apart from his parents, and had followed his own ways of conduct and of thought, yet his father's good judgment and restraining counsel still had weight with him, and exercised an influence which, though limited, was wholesome.

Ruskin's education and pursuits had not fitted him for the charge of a large property. But his now independent wealth gave him full opportunity for the satisfaction of his lavish impulses and the gratification of his tastes. The immediate duties which fell upon him in connection with the winding up of his father's affairs, and in the attendance upon his mother, now more than eighty years old, kept him in England during 1864 and 1865, and the winter of

1866.

Yours affectionately,

J. RUSKIN.

On the 3d of March, 1864, his father had died, an old man in his seventyninth year, but with his faculties clear and strong to the end. "By his father's death," says Mr. Harrison in his Life of Ruskin, "Ruskin inherited a fortune of £157,000,1 in addition to a considerable

1 His father left to Ruskin outright £120,000, and to his mother £37,000.

variety of subjects. In 1865 he published, under the enigmatic title of Sesame and Lilies, two lectures, one on the worth and use of books, the other on the ideals and duties of women; in 1866 came a series of lectures on "Work," "Traffic,” “War,” and "The Future of England," gathered into a volume called the Crown of Wild Olive; in the same year appeared the Ethics of the Dust, lectures given to a girls' school in the country, professedly on the elements of Crystallization, but with "the purpose of awaking in the minds of

young girls a vital interest in the subject of their study." Nor were these by any means all his writings.

A year passed from the date of the last letter before I received another from him.

DENMARK HILL, 15th August, 1865. MY DEAR NORTON, - I have just received your book on the portraits, which is very right and satisfactory, and pleasant to have done.1 There won't be many old walls left, frescoed or whitewashed either in Florence now. I should have liked to have seen it once again - before they build iron bridges over Arno but it is no matter.

Now you've done fighting, I can talk to you a little again but I've nothing to say. I keep the house pretty fairly in order, and keep my garden weeded and the gardeners never disturb the birds; but the cats eat them. I am taking up mineralogy again as a pacific and unexciting study; only I can't do the confounded mathematics of their new books. I am at work on some botany of weeds, too, and such like, and am better on the whole than I was two years ago. My mother is pretty well, too—sometimes I get her out to take a drive, and she enjoys it, but always has to be teased into going. Carlyle has got through the first calamity of rest, after Frederick, among his Scotch Hills and I hope will give us something worthier of him before he dies. Rossetti and the rest I never see now - they go their way and I mine; so you see I've no news - but I'm always Affectionately yours,

J. RUSKIN.

DENMARK HILL, 11th September, 1865. MY DEAR NORTON, I should have written to you some news of myself, though the war has put a gulph between all Americans and me in that I do not care to hear what they think, or tell them what I think, on any matter; and Low

1 The Original Portraits of Dante, a privately printed volume on occasion of the celebration VOL. XCIV – NO. DLXI

ell's work and Longfellow's is all now quite useless to me. But I shall send you an edition of my last lectures, however, with a new bit of preface in it, and anything else I may get done in the course of the winter, and I am always glad to hear of you. I am somewhat better in health, and busy in several quiet ways, of which, if anything prosper in them, you will hear in their issue- and nobody need hear until then. Ever affectionately yours, J. RUSKIN.

DENMARK HILL, 27 March, 1866. MY DEAR NORTON, First, please be assured, as I think you must have been without my telling you, that when I would not write to you during the American war, it was not because I loved you less, but because I could no otherwise than by silence express the intensity of my adverse feeling to the things you were countenancing and causing; for of course the good men in America were the real cause and strength of the war. Now, it is past, I have put in my protest, and we are the same full friends as always, except only that I can't read American sentiment any more - in its popular form and so can't sympathize with you in all things as before. . . .

Ever your affectionate

J. RUSKIN. The portrait has been a little checked, but is going on well. In about three weeks I am going to try to get as far as Venice, for change of thought. I want to see a Titian once more before I dieand I'm not quite sure when that may not be (as if anybody was), yet, on the whole, my health is better. I've some work in hand which you will like, I think, also. Affectionate regards to your mother and sisters.

thanks and thoughts). I am painting birds, and shells, and the like, to amuse myself and keep from sulking, but I sulk much.

Yes, it is indeed time we should meet - but it will be to exchange glances and hearts not thoughts, for I have no thoughts - I am so puzzled about everything that I've given up thinking altogether. It seems to me likely that I shall draw into a very stern, lonely life, if life at all, doing perhaps some small work of hand with what gift I have, peacefully, and in the next world if there is any

I hope to begin a little better and get on farther. I want to send this by "return of post" and must close.

Ever your affectionate

2

about the Turners, which I am very thankful for all your kind thoughts about - but indeed the only "kindness" of mine is in putting you, as it were ten years back, on fair terms of purchase I wish I had the pleasure of giving - all my art treasures are now useless to me, except for reference; the whole subject of art is so painful to me, and the history of Turner and all my own lost opportunities of saving his work, are a perpetual torment to me, if I begin thinking of them. But this was what I wanted to say Your American friends, even those who know not of art may be much disappointed with the Liber Studiorum, for the nobleness of those designs is not so much in what is done, as in what is not done in them. Any tyro-looking at them first-would say, Why, I can do trees better than that figures betterrocks better everything better. "Yes --and the daguerreotype- similarly better than you," is the answer, first; but the final answer the showing how every touch in these plates is related to every other, and has no permission of withdrawn, monastic virtue, but is only good in its connection with the rest, and in that connection infinitely and inimitably good

and the showing how each of the designs is connected by all manner of strange intellectual chords and nerves with the pathos and history of this old English country of ours; and on the other side, with the history of European mind from earliest mythology down to modern rationalism and ir-rationalism - all this showing which was what I meant to try for in my closing work I felt, long before the closing, to be impossible; and the mystery of it all the God's making of the great mind, and the martyrdom of it, and the uselessness of it all forever, as far as human eyes can see or thoughts travel- All these things it is of no use talking about.

I am here among the lakes resting, and trying to recover some tone of body. I

2 Some plates from the Liber Studiorum, and some pencil drawings.

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All you say of religion is true and right but the deadly question with me is - What next? or if anything is next? so that I've no help, but rather increase of wonder and horror from that.

One word more about Turner. You see every great man's work (his pre-eminently) is a digestion of nature, which makes glorious HUMAN FLESH of it. All my first work in Modern Painters was to show that one must have nature to digest not chalk and water for milk. Ever lovingly yours,

Nuova, with all their good help to me, came to hand, one by one- they are all in my special own shelf of bookcase, and will take me back again to long ceased Dante studies though in returning to him, the terrible "What do you mean, or believe of all this?" fronts me with appalling strangeness. Longfellow's translation is excellent and most helpful. The Vita Nuova falls in much with my own mind but when death or life depends on such things suppose it should

be morte nuova day by day? I am also working at Greek myths and art, and the like, and hope to give you some account of myself one day, and of my time.

Of the Turners I can tell you nothing, except that I wholly concur in your judgment of their relative merits, and that the subjects you enquire about are, I think, all on the Rhine, but none of them absolutely known to me. I shall try and find one or two more for you, and give you some better account of them.

I am thankful that you believe such things can be of service in America. My own impression is that they are useless, everywhere—but better times may come. I wish you would come here once again I need you now. I only enjoyed you before. Ever your

affectionate

J. RUSKIN.

XXV

He had been lying there long hours close to the warm earth that was preparing for a new life. The thin branches of the trees rose bare and severe between him and the blue sky, mementos of the silent winter. The ground about their trunks was matted with dead leaves, through which nothing green had yet pushed its way. Nevertheless, the earth seemed yeasty with promise. The intense, unwonted heat of the April days had broken the crust of soil, and set the sap of life in motion once more. The air was heavy with earthy odors, a fragrant forecast of Nature's regeneration. Deep down in the little ravines, and among the pools of the meadowland beyond, frogs were croaking harshly, filling the solitude of the still slumbering woods with the clamor of awakening life. And through the brown tree trunks, above the tracery of the topmost branches, over the flat fields, there swam the haze of earliest spring, vague atmosphere of renascence, the warm breath of mother earth.

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a

The man lay there, empty of thought, feeling merely the mighty movement of things around him, an inert mass in a vital world. The odors of the earth stirred in him old sensations of vivid springtimes in his youth. He saw again the morning mist swimming above the little Wisconsin lakes where he used to hunt, and felt the throb of joy for the incoming spring. And he remembered how this outer world had spoken to him one day while he was sitting over his work in Paris. Something imperceptible had crept into the room over the endless roofs, and called to him in a low, persistent voice. Then he had listened, joyously putting aside his task, and obeyed

Copyright, 1903, by

the invitation, wandering idly forth into the germinating fields, which in some mysterious way had purified his soul. In his youth that experience had come to him again and again, an impulse from beyond his world, which had led him forth from himself, from the soil of living, to fresh vigor and purity of soul. Latterly, there had come to him no call like this; he had known no abandonment of self in the enveloping force of Nature, no purification of spirit. The trees and the grass, the earth and the sky, all the multitudinous voices of unconscious life, had not spoken to him. Shut within himself, driven by the bitter furies of his own little heart, he had worked from season to season, forgetting the face of Nature. True, he had lived the outdoor life of the world, passed through the beautiful fields each season, just as he had gone to the theatre or the opera. But the earth had not spoken to him, alone, personally, out of her abundant wisdom, garnered through the limitless years. For all the period of his maturity he had forgotten the great mother of life!

Now, wrecked and bruised, he lay there on her breast, as a sick man might lie in the silent room of a hospital and listen to the large commotion of life without. He was content to rest there on the warm earth, listening and waiting for the voice which should come from beyond; content to forget himself, a creature that had been industriously shaped for eight busy years, a creature of the city and of men, with a self that was his in part only, and was mixed with all those others whom he had touched. That figure of deformity, made in the strife of the city, he no longer recognized to be his. . . . The sun sank into the deepening blue haze of the heavens; the thin shadows of the trees faded ROBERT HERRICK.