INTRODUCTION xxvii

thistlefield at Crossmount”-he had “wise thoughts and wholesome sleep after them.”¹ “Those thoughts,” he adds, “are scattered afterwards up and down in Fors and Munera Pulveris.” Nor are they absent from The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which book we may find the germs of some of his later teaching in the political economy of art, and catch the first sound of waves of thought and feeling on social questions, afterwards to reverberate more loud and clear.² Letters written from Scotland to W. H. Harrison contain passages which show the current of Ruskin’s thoughts at this time:-

DUNBAR, August 20, 1847.-... I am much better since I left London, getting regular exercise and rest. I hope I shall not again fall into the state I was in all this winter, grievous to myself and stupid to everybody. Still there is a certain amount of spleen, or what else it may more justly be called, mingled with my present feelings which I cannot shake off. I cannot understand how you merry people can smile through the world as you do. It seems to me a sad one-more suffering than pleasure in it, and less of hope than of either-at least if the interpretations set by the most pious people on the Bible be true, and if not, then worse still. But it is woeful to see these poor fishermen toiling all night and bringing in a few casks of herrings each, twice a week or so, and lying watching their nets dry on the cliffs all day; their wives and children abused and dirty-scolding, fighting, and roaring through their unvarying lives. How much more enviable the sea-gulls that, all this stormy day, have been tossing themselves off and on the crags and winds like flakes of snow, and screaming with very joy. Certainly there must be something very wrong about man, when this is so; he could not be the unhappy animal he is but by his own fault.

The fourth edition of Modern Painters, vol. i., was at this time passing through the press, and Harrison relieved Ruskin of all trouble in the matter, who in a letter from Crossmount (Sept. 18) thanks his friend

“for the care and much trouble you have taken these two times respecting my rubbishy book. How sick you must be of reading such stuff again and again! Worse by half than my promenades in the Leamington pump-room-to the tune of an old harp, fiddle, and flute.”

¹ See Præterita, ii. ch. x. § 197, where account is given of this visit to his friend William Macdonald, of Crossmount.

² See below, notes on pp. 218, 264.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]