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remained with him to the end. He had said to a visitor some years before, to whom he was showing the Turners in his bedroom, “When I die, I hope that they may be the last things my eyes will rest on in this world.”¹ And so it was to be. But it was noticed that in the end nature seemed to assert a victory over art, even as he had said: “You will never love art well till you love what she mirrors better.”² “My Turners,” he sometimes said to Mrs. Severn, with a puzzled smile, “seem to have lost something of their radiance.” Well, “the best in this sort are but shadows.”³ But he never wearied of watching the play of light and shade upon lake or mountain, and the changing aspects of the sky. The confidence, which he had mentioned in Præterita, “in my own heart’s love of rainbows to the end,”⁴ was justified. The words of the poet, whose disciple he had proclaimed himself to be on the title-page of Modern Painters, were fulfilled: “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” The voice and pen, which had done so much to interpret and reveal the beauties of art and nature, were silent; the eager brain and tender heart, which had turned the interpreter of beauty into the prophet or the sage, had worn themselves out in conflict with the fever of the world. But one likes to think that to this lifelong lover of Nature, as he sat day after day in his eyrie, there came sometimes “that blessed mood” of which Wordsworth speaks;⁵ that “the burthen and the mystery” were lightened; and that with some “deep power of joy” he “saw into the life of things.”

The end, for which Ruskin had waited so long, came suddenly and peacefully. “On the morning of Thursday, the 18th of January 1900, he was remarkably well; but when Mrs. Arthur Severn went to him as usual after tea, in order to read to him the war news and In the Golden Days, by Edna Lyall, his throat seemed irritable. His cousin was alarmed, for several of her servants were ill with influenza; but the Professor was inclined to laugh it off, although he said he did not feel well, and admitted, when questioned, that he felt pain ‘all over.’ Helped by his faithful body-servant Baxter, he was put to bed, and he listened whilst Mrs. Severn sang a much-liked song, ‘Summer Slumber.’ It was now 6.30, and Ruskin declared that he felt quite comfortable. Nevertheless, Dr. Parsons was immediately summoned.

¹ George Harley, F.R.S., by his daughter, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, 1899, p. 233.

² Eagle’s Nest, § 41 (Vol. XXII. p. 153).

³ Ruskin often quoted the words of Shakespeare: see Vol. XX. p. 300 and n.

⁴ See ii. § 143 (below, p. 374).

⁵ The lines are quoted in Vol. VII. p. xxiv.

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