INTRODUCTION xxv

cloisters I ever explored, with endlessly varied capitals and inscriptions in contracted eleventh-century Latin, at which Newton went like a hound at a fox scent.”

At Milan Newton left them, and they set their faces towards Venice and the Stones:-

“(MILAN, August 28.)-I am sitting with Effie in the outside balcony of the Hotel Royal. Newton is kicking my chair, so that I cannot write so well as usual, the soft air of the afternoon is just breathing past, and no more, and a subdued sunshine resting on the red roofs high above us, and on some streaks of white cloud which cross the arches of a campanile far down the narrow street. Effie is in a state of intense delight at being again in Italy, and poor Newton in much sorrow at having to go away by diligence to-morrow, and I am very sorry for him, for it would be very distressful to myself-I don’t think I ever enjoyed Italy so much. We have had a complete day at St. Ambrogio and the Cathedral, and are just going out for a drive on the Corso. I could not write a long letter to-day, having been showing Newton all I could and making some notes myself. I would give, I don’t know how much, to have Newton with me in Italy; he helps me so infinitely in dates, and in tracing styles; he has gained a marvellous power of rapid judgment of all sculpturesque art, and we never differ about what we are to like in sculpture; sometimes, however, a little in painting, but very little even in this, and his eye is quite as quick as mine; he found out a Tintoret to-day merely by the glance, which I had missed. I am quite well, and preparing to set to my work with zest.”

All the while that Ruskin was approaching his Venetian work, he felt it to be only an interlude and an interruption. “I hope to come back here with you,” he writes to his parents from Geneva (August 19), “when my Venetian work is off my hands, and I can give myself up again to the snowy mountains which I love better than ever.” But arrived at Venice, he soon felt its charm renewed. “It is more beautiful,” he writes, “than ever, and I am most thankful to be able to finish or retouch my descriptions on the spot” (September 2). Wherever beauty was to be found Ruskin had the heart to worship it, and whatever his hands found to do he did with all his might. This, as he says in an interesting piece of self-revelation, contained in a letter to his father (Verona, June 2, 1852), was his genius:-

“Miss Edgeworth may abuse the word ‘genius,’ but there is such a thing, and it consists mainly in a man’s doing things because he cannot help it,-intellectual things, I mean. I don’t think myself a great

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