INTRODUCTION xxiii

The work thus accomplished often brought peace and pleasure to Ruskin. “A white day,” he writes in his diary (February 5, 1885), “getting Sir Herbert’s book¹ all planned and the first chapter sent to press (most of it now done), and embroideries sent to Irish school.” And, again, “Yesterday (May 3) sent to printer the last sheets of Songs of Tuscany, very thankful to have been spared to finish them rightly. Strong at work in every direction, and wonderfully content in it, D.G..” And so in the following year, “Well and cheerful (January 3, 1886), and doing most useful work.” “Yesterday,” he says a little later (April 26), “most successful work; quiet day in the woods.... Got up thinking what marvellous powers and influences I have now, if I use them honestly and bravely”; and again on the next day:-

“An entirely blessed and pure morning; absolutely calm, with dew on fields. I out to the gate corner to see Helvellyn. Cloudless wind on lake; then garden; then anemones. All kinds of helpful thought sent with the beauty, D.G.”

And once more (May 1):-

“Slept well, after lovely walk on top of moor at cloudless sunset, feeling how thankful beyond words, or thought, I should be for having such a place to live at, and painless, if not now powerful, body and limbs to bear me still on a rock path. Down in good heart. How I enjoy my work! and I have just been reading poor Carlyle on last volume of Frederick!”²

The limbs still bore him upon many a mountain ramble, and in September of this year he wrote to Professor Norton³ that he had been half-way up Coniston Old Man, “without more fatigue than deepened the night’s rest.” An entry, some months later, shows him busy, as ever, with multifarious tasks:-

“January 9, 1887, Sunday.-Sixteen letters written on Friday; eleven yesterday. Mineral ticketing. Chess playing. Botanical lesson to Gussie, musical to Annie, painting to Robert Redhead.⁴ Miss Murray found out; and promised support in bird drawing.⁵

¹ A Knight’s Faith (Vol. XXXI.).

² That is, as told in Froude’s Life of Carlyle.

³ See a letter of September 13 in Vol. XXXVII.

⁴ Children in the village school at Coniston.

⁵ References to Miss Murray will be found in the Letters (Vol. XXXVII.); and there are studies by her-of flowers, however-in the Sheffield Museum (Vol. XXX. p. 241).

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