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labour and disappointed hope; and I can neither bear the excitement of being in the society where the play of mind is constant, and rolls over me like heavy wheels, nor the pain of being alone. I get away in the evenings into the hayfields about Cumnor,¹ and rest; but then my failing sight plagues me. I cannot look at anything as I used to do, and the evening sky is covered with swimming strings and eels. My best time is while I am in the Section room, for though it is hot, and sometimes wearisome, yet I have nothing to say,-little to do,-nothing to look at, and as much as I like to hear.

It is not surprising that the receipt of this letter convinced Ruskin’s parents that his health needed serious attention. He was sent accordingly, as in 1841,² to Leamington for a month’s “cure” under Dr. Jephson. In a characteristic passage in the diary written there, Ruskin speaks of an increasing volatility and listlessness:-

LEAMINGTON, July 29.-As I was walking down the chief street this afternoon, somewhat languid-partly owing to the weather, and partly to a disappointment in the ill-success of a laboured drawing, and partly from causes unknown, I could not help looking into the stationers’ windows for some book to amuse me, though I have now on the table The Guardian and Pamela, and I Promessi Sposi, besides Wordsworth and Dante, and several books on chemistry, and a Quarterly, and Eastlake’s book on oil painting, and George Herbert and Plato. All these came into my mind, and at the same time, very reproachfully, Wordsworth’s account of the poor clergyman, Robert Walker, who “allowed not a moment of recreation except upon a Saturday afternoon, when he indulged himself with a Newspaper, or sometimes with a Magazine.”³ What a foretaste of Paradise to such a man would this room of mine be, this leisure and these books. So I walked past all the stationers, resolved not to encourage any more this continually increasing volatility and listlessness; and yet so far, I have thought since I came home, that much of the poor clergyman’s time being given to labour in the field, and the rest to matters interesting to heart and conscience, left no room for the peculiar lassitude, which continual book occupation can hardly but induce. I will not buy any more books, but I am not sure that I am very wrong in wishing to do so.

Ruskin missed during this year 1847 the stimulus of foreign travel.⁴ But he went in the late summer to Scotland, and there-“in the

¹ A retreat of which Matthew Arnold also was fond: see The Scholar-Gipsy.

² See Vol. I. pp. xlii., 395 n., 455.

³ Wordsworth’s “Memoir of the Rev. Robert Walker,” in the notes to the Poems, p. 829 of John Morley’s edition (Macmillan).

⁴ Cf. Vol. I. p. xxx., Vol. II. p. 395; and see above, on p. xxv., his yearning for “bright colours and snowy peaks.”

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