INTRODUCTION xxxiii

some days in November at Merligen on the lake of Thun, whence he wrote to Mrs. Severn:-

“(MERLIGEN, Sunday, 11th Nov.)-The gentians I sent you a day or two ago were gathered by Detmar-higher than I can climb now: but I got up a good way this afternoon, and found two blue-bells, which I love better for my Joanie’s sake than all the Swiss flowers that ever grew. This is a perfect village of Swiss cottages. Not a shop in it but one for general groceries, in the upper story of the water-mill, and a watchmaker’s-without a watch visible.”

This was a last gleam. The foreign tour of 1888 had no such recruiting effect as that of 1882.¹ He was taken seriously ill at Paris in December, whither Mrs. Severn hastened. She brought him back to Herne Hill, and presently to Brantwood. When he was able to think of work once more, he was still busy upon Præterita, and had the book planned out, as we shall see subsequently, to the end of a third volume. But his strength was gone, and the fulfilment of the plan was laid aside. But there was one chapter which he could not abandon, so long as the pen and brain were in any sort equal to obeying the promptings of the heart. This was the record of his long companionship with Mrs. Severn, who had come into his home when his father died, and who still remained to him. The last chapter of Præterita, “Joanna’s Care,” was no afterthought; it and its title were included in the first plans of the book, but this was all that he could now save from the wreck of his design. He had gone in the summer of 1889 for sea air to Seascale on the Cumberland coast, and it was there that Ruskin’s last piece was written. It was composed, though in the closing words with some of his old grace and skill, with difficulty and discursiveness:-

“In his bedroom at Seascale,” says Mr. Collingwood, “morning after morning, he still worked, or tried to work, as he had been used to do on journeys farther afield in brighter days. But now he seemed lost among the papers scattered on his table; he could not fix his mind upon them, and turned from one subject to another in despair; and yet patient, and kindly to those with him whose help he could no longer use, and who dared not show-though he could not but guess-how heart-breaking it was.

“They put the best face upon it, of course: drove in the afternoons about the country-to Muncaster Castle, to Calder Abbey, where he tried to sketch once more; and when the proofs of ‘Joanna’s Care’ were finally revised, to Wastwater.”²

¹ See Vol. XXXIII. p. xlv.

² Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, pp. 386-387.

XXXV. c

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