xlii INTRODUCTION

and by vexatious proceedings which arose out of it; but at length, at the end of June, they left, homeward bound, with the greater part of the second and third volumes of his book roughed out. They returned by the St. Gothard, and Ruskin stayed a day or two once more in the scenes of some of his best-beloved Turner drawings. Venice, as we have seen, was a by-work; it was among the fields and hills that Ruskin felt upon his native heath:-

“AIROLO, Sunday, 4th July [1852].-I do not know when I have reached a more delightful place for a Sunday’s rest. There is a new inn here, not a fashionable hotel, but small, clean, and Swiss. The weather was lovely yesterday, and this morning is cloudless; and the contrast between the filth and vice of Venice and the purity of the scene which I have before me to-day is intense beyond expression. I always used to feel rejoiced in coming out of Italy into Switzerland; but this time I have been more completely shut into a city-though a beautiful one-than ever in my life before. There are indeed gardens and vines scattered among the houses, but one’s eye in Venice is never familiar with grass or vegetation, and is necessarily familiar with much misery and wickedness; and the scene before my window this morning is one of the most exquisite purity and peace; a good deal like that from our windows at Chamouni, but the green slopes of hill less steep, and softer, all broken into sweet knolls and studded with cottages and clusters of pine, and above them a mass of snowy rocks, not disfigured by débris or glaciers, but with the snow glittering in starry fragments upon their flanks, and crowning them with delicate lines and threads of silver, and the Ticino murmuring in the valley-not a white glacier stream, but clear and blue, and so far away that its sound is like the gentle voice of one of our English streams; and down the valley, promontory beyond promontory of pines, all dim with the morning mist and sunshine. I had no idea Airolo was so beautifully placed, but one must rest at a place before it can be known. To-morrow, D. V., we sleep at Fluelen, where I want to see the evening and morning effect upon the scene of our loveliest Turner. I shall then send the carriage we have brought from Verona to Lucerne by the steamer, but I shall go round by Schwytz and Goldau to see Turner’s other subjects.”

The middle of July (1852) saw Ruskin at home, and he settled down at once to finish his book. He had given up his house in Park Street before going abroad in the previous summer; he could not live any more, he said, “with a dead brick wall opposite his windows.”¹ His father had taken and furnished for him a house on Herne Hill (No. 30), next door to his old house, and there he and his wife resided till the following

¹ See the letter to Samuel Rogers, given in the Introduction to the next volume.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]