INTRODUCTION lxxi

duty seemed to command was to interpose a period of delay. Rosie at the time was not yet of full age, and it was agreed that she and Ruskin should not meet for a while. He was to wait three years, Rosie had said;¹ she would then be twenty-one, and would give her answer. Ruskin was in the habit, as we have seen, of numbering his days, and his diaries at this time count them as they diminished towards the appointed year.

Rosie’s uncertain health and mental development tended, however, to interpose fresh difficulties. Even as quite a young girl, she had been subject, as has been said, to severe headaches, and once she had been threatened with brain-fever. As she grew up, a certain restlessness and a constant desire for change betokened a neurotic tendency. She was from a child, as we have seen, intensely religious; and Ruskin recounts² how, a little later, when she was a girl of eighteen, she astonished a party in a friend’s house by compelling them to kneel down and pray with her for a sick friend. The religious feeling passed into an almost morbid phase, and encouraged a strain of melancholy in her mind. In 1870 she had published a little volume of devotional prose and verse, entitled Clouds and Light. The title and the contents alike reveal the mingled texture of her thoughts. One of the pieces is particularly self-revealing:-

“I would look back upon my life to-night,

Whose years have scarcely numbered twenty-two;

I would recall the darkness and the light,

The hours of pain God’s angels led me through;

Out of His love He orders all things right,

I, slow of heart, would feel that this is true.

I, in those years, have learnt that life is sad,

Sad to heart-breaking did we walk alone.

I, who have lost much which I never had,

Yet which in ignorance I held mine own,

Would leave that clouded past, its good and bad,

Within His hands to whom all things are known.

Oh, dearer than my failing words express,

Is nature’s beauty to this heart of mine;

Yet for the soul’s most utter weariness

She has no balm nor any anodyne;

Her ‘changeful glories’ may not heal or bless

The human heart which cries for the divine.”

¹ See in Vol. XXXVII. a letter to “M. G.” of 1st February, 1879. Meanwhile she had refused another lover (as appears from a letter of Ruskin’s to his mother, July 24, 1867).

² In a letter to Miss Kate Greenaway, January 23, 1884 (Vol. XXXVII.).

[Version 0.04: March 2008]