xxx INTRODUCTION

lovely long tea talk and agreed about everything, and she said so many pretty things of my Joanie, and a great many of me, and I came away greatly cheered and helped, and resolved to write to her now with some consistency.”

Ruskin’s occasional visits to London during these years were a great pleasure to his friends. “I hope you will be coming to London,” wrote Cardinal Manning (April 17, 1887), “for I should like to begin again at our last semicolon in the carriage by South Kensington.” “Those two hours which I spent with you in the South Kensington Museum,” said Froude, “are as fresh in my memory as a poem. You might give me another two hours there; or there is Owen’s wonderful gallery of bones and minerals. The bones he has himself explained to me, and you could make the stones into a palace of crystals.”

From London Ruskin returned to Sandgate, where some more weeks were spent in alternate depression and excitement. He determined once more to try the tonic of foreign travel which had proved effectual in 1882. Early in June Mr. Arthur Severn accompanied him to Abbeville and Beauvais, where they stayed for some weeks.¹ “Restored, D.G.,” he wrote in his diary at Beauvais (July 12), “as far as I can judge, to comparative health, and power of useful and even beautiful work, after the most terrific year of illness and despondency I have yet known.” At Abbeville he was arrested, and detained for a while, much to his amusement, for sketching the fortifications. A few letters written thence, which will be found in Vol. XXXVII., show some faint traces of his old gaiety and buoyancy. He had much pleasure in the company of Mr. Sydney Carlyle Cockerell and Mr. Detmar Blow, whom he had met at Abbeville, and the young men threw themselves with loyal alacrity into pleasing him. “Carlyle,” he wrote to Mrs. Severn (July 7), “carries my umbrella for me as if he were attending the Emperor of Japan,” and “Detmar is as good as gold.” The enthusiasm and affection of young men and women were always grateful to Ruskin, and he was encouraged to go further afield, and revisit the scenes of dearest memory among the mountains and in Italy. Mr. Detmar Blow was free to accompany him, and they

¹ Of this last tour of Ruskin’s, in 1888, a full itinerary cannot be compiled, as the diary is fragmentary. He was in France till the end of August; at Dijon, August 28; St. Cergues, September 2; Geneva, September 4; Sallenches, September 8; Chamouni, September 13; Martigny, September 19; Brieg, September 20; Domo d’Ossola, September 21; Baveno, September 22; Milan, September 23; Bassano, September 26; Venice, October 10; at Merlingen (on the Lake of Thun), in November; at Berne, November 26.

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