xxxviii INTRODUCTION

rejoice with you in your recovering strength, and to learn from you how to enjoy, and how to love.

“God willing, I will come to see you about the middle of next week, writing again to tell you the day. I cannot come sooner, because it is necessary that I should now show myself for a few days in London, in order to convince my friends, and some, who are otherwise than friends, that I am the same person I used to be. You will perhaps not easily believe that of all my friends you are the only one whose tact-whose sympathy and feeling, I ought rather to say-have been unerring, during the trial I have had lately to go through. Some wrote to me asking questions which very little common sense might have told them never could be answered; others wrote in useless and inappropriate condolence; some in the style of Eliphaz and Zophar; and the rest kept a terrified silence, depriving me of the pleasure I might have had in hearing from them about their own affairs. You only knew what to do.

“I have a great deal to talk to you about when I come, so that I shall stay for a day or two at Reading, and come each day at the time when you are able to see me, and therefore I must engage my days at once. Can you give me a little bit of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, next week? Do not trouble to write if you can, but if you have any other appointments made for Wednesday or Thursday, would you just send me the merest line? If the appointment be for Friday, do not write, as I will come on Wednesday, and then arrange with you. My father and mother are most thoroughly happy to hear you are better, and send their sincere love.

“Ever, dear Miss Mitford,

“Most affectionately yours,

“J. RUSKIN.”

On setting down to a new life, which was yet the old, Ruskin threw himself with fervour into various activities of unselfish beneficence. It was at this time that he began to cultivate a friendship with Dante Rossetti and his financée, Miss Siddal, for whose benefit he devised one of those unnumbered acts of generosity by which (says Rossetti’s brother) “he will be remembered hardly less than long by his vivid insight into many things, and his heroic prose.”¹ Ruskin’s relations with Rossetti are disclosed in numerous letters which will be found in a later volume of this edition. So also will several further letters to Miss Mitford.

¹ Dante Gabriel Rossetti: his Family Letters, with a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti, 1895, i. 184.

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