52 PRÆTERITA-I

and Lucy, combined with Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues.¹ The earliest dated efforts I can find, indicating incipient motion of brain-molecules, are six “poems” on subjects selected from those works; between the fourth and fifth of which my mother has written: “January, 1826. This book begun about September or October, 1826, finished about January, 1827.” The whole of it, therefore, was written and printed in imitation of book-print, in my seventh year. The book is a little red one, ruled with blue, six inches high by four wide, containing forty-five leaves pencilled in imitation of print on both sides,-the title-page, written in the form here approximately imitated, on the inside of the cover.²

62. Of the promised four volumes, it appears that (according to my practice to this day) I accomplished but one and a quarter, the first volume consisting only of forty leaves, the rest of the book being occupied by the aforesaid six “poems,” and the forty leaves losing ten of their pages in the “copper plates,” of which the one, purporting to represent “Harry’s new road,” is, I believe, my first effort at mountain drawing. The passage closing the first volume of this work is, I think, for several reasons, worth preservation. I print it, therefore, with its own divisions of line, and three variations of size in imitated type. Punctuation must be left to the reader’s kind conjecture. The hyphens, it is to be noticed, were put long or short, to make the print even, not that it ever succeeds in being so, but the variously spaced lines here imitate it pretty well.

Harry knew very well-what it was and went on with his drawing but

¹ [For Ruskin’s numerous references to Frank and Harry and Lucy, see the General Index; Jeremiah Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues were in seven vols., 1809.]

² [For an account of the MS. book containing “Harry and Lucy” and six “poems,” see Vol. II. p. 529; extracts from the poems are given in the same volume, pp. 254 seq.]

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