INTRODUCTION lxxv

pictures by R. in sweet mosaic colour, of signs from her; but all confused and vague in waking. I recollect saying as I looked at the drawing, ‘Ah, what a creature lost!’ I did not mean lost to myself, but to the world.”

And so in Fors Clavigera of the same date he wrote: “It is eleven years to-day since the 2nd of February became a great festival to me: now, like all the days of all the years, a shadow; deeper, this, in beautiful shade.”¹ As the years of waiting lengthened, the lady whom he loved came perhaps “apparell’d in more precious habit,” and the pang of parting was so far assuaged that he could speak freely of his loss and his hope. To some intimates among his men friends, he used to talk of Rose; and to sympathetic women not a few he would open his heart very unreservedly. It is pleasant to know, as appears from letters printed in a later volume, that the estrangement, not unmixed with bitterness on his side, between Ruskin and Rose’s mother was healed by time. Mr. and Mrs. La Touche were in his later years honoured guests at Brantwood, and her letters were among those which he valued most. He did not die, then, of a broken heart; but it can hardly be doubted that the strain placed upon his emotions by the chequered course of this romance was one of the elements which contributed to overthrow his mental balance. He himself, in describing to a friend the course of his first attack, associated it expressly with imagined visions of his lost love.

Of Rose’s appearance, Ruskin has penned two pictures. One is the description in Præterita (p. 525) of her as a child of nine or ten. The other was written at the end of 1884 in a letter to a friend:-

“Rose was tall and brightly fair, her face of the most delicately chiselled beauty-too severe to be entirely delightful to all people-the eyes grey and, when she was young, full of play; after the sad times came, the face became nobly serene-and of a strange beauty-so that once a stranger seeing her for the first time said ‘she looked like a young sister of Christ’s.’”²

It is the Rose of this latter description that is shown in Ruskin’s pencil-drawing, of the year 1874, here reproduced.

¹ Letter 75, § 10 (Vol. XXIX. p. 66).

² “John Ruskin in the ’Eighties,” in the Outlook, October 21, 1899; repeated in Scribner’s Magazine, November 1906, p. 565. A writer in the Freeman’s Journal (November 27, 1906), in a notice of the death of Mrs. La Touche, describes her daughter as “a very lovely girl, with deep blue eyes, flaxen hair, exquisitely chiselled features, somewhat aquiline nose, and mouth indicative of firmness. She

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