INTRODUCTION xxv

companion, to write his review. A letter to his mother shows him in a somewhat despondent mood:-

(Sunday, March 28, 1847).-... I finished-and sealed up-and addressed-my last bit of work, last night by ten o’clock-ready to send by to-day’s post-so that my father should receive it with this. I could not at all have done it, had I stayed at home; for even with all the quiet here, I have had no more time than was necessary. For exercise, I find the rowing very useful, though it makes me melancholy with thinking of 1838,¹-and the lake, when it is quite calm, is wonderfully sad and quiet: no bright colours-no snowy peaks. Black water-as still as death;-lonely, rocky islets-leafless woods,-or worse than leafless, the brown oak foliage hanging dead upon them; gray sky;-far-off, wild, dark, dismal moorlands; no sound except the rustling of the boat among the reeds....

One o’clock.-I have your kind note and my father’s, and am very thankful that you like what I have written, for I did not at all know myself whether it were good or bad.²

Good or bad, it elicited no favouring words from Miss Lockhart, and another letter, written three months later from Oxford (whither Ruskin had gone for the meeting of the British Association), reveals an increasing despondency, indicative too of ill-health:-

(June 27, 1847.)-I am not able to write a full account of all I see, to amuse you, for I find it necessary to keep as quiet as I can, and I fear it would only annoy you to be told of all the invitations I refuse, and all the interesting matters in which I take no part. There is nothing for it but throwing one’s self into the stream, and going down with one’s arms under water, ready to be carried anywhere, or do anything. My friends are all busy, and tired to death. All the members of my section, but especially Forbes, Sedgwick, Murchison, and Lord Northampton-and of course Buckland,³ are as kind to me as men can be; but I am tormented by the perpetual feeling of being in everybody’s way. The recollections of the place, too, and the being in my old rooms, make me very miserable. I have not one moment of profitably spent time to look back to while I was here, and much useless

¹ In which year he spent the summer with his parents in the Lake country.

² This letter and the one following are reprinted from W. G. Collingwood’s Life, 1900, pp. 108-109.

³ Edward Forbes (1815-1854), President of the Geological Society, 1853. Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873), President of British Association, 1833, and of its Geological Section, 1837, 1845, 1853, 1860. Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871), President of the Royal Geographical Society, 1843; Director-General of the Geological Survey, 1855. Spencer Alwyne Compton, second Marquis of Northampton (1790-1851), President of the Royal Society, 1838-1849. For Buckland, see Vol. I. p. 211. Ruskin was one of the secretaries of the Geological Section for the Oxford meeting (see Report of the Seventeenth Meeting of the British Association, p. xv.)

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