xlvi INTRODUCTION

loan of the gallant young man’s Memoirs was what I expected;¹ and here, in the most chivalrous style, comes a gift of them. This, I think, must be in the style prior to the Renaissance! What can I do but accept your kindness with pleasure and gratitude, though it is far beyond my deserts? Perhaps the next man I meet will use me as much below them, and so bring matters straight again. Truly I am much obliged, and return you many hearty thanks.

I was already deep in the Stones; and clearly purpose to hold on there. A strange, unexpected, and I believe, most true and excellent Sermon in Stones-as well as the best piece of schoolmastering in Architectorics; from which I hope to learn much in a great many ways. The spirit and purport of these critical studies of yours are a singular sign of the times to me, and a very gratifying one. Right good speed to you, and victorious arrival on the farther shore! It is a quite new “Renaissance,” I believe, we are getting into just now: either towards new, wider manhood, high again as the eternal stars; or else into final death, and the marsh of Gehenna for evermore! A dreadful process, but a needful and inevitable one; nor do I doubt at all which way the issue will be, though which of the extant nations are to get included in it, and which is to be trampled out and abolished in the process, may be very doubtful. God is great; and sure enough, the changes in the “Construction of Sheepfolds,” as well as in other things, will require to be very considerable.

We are still labouring under the foul kind of influenza here, I not far emancipated, my poor wife still deep in the business, though, I hope, past deepest. Am I to understand that you too are seized? In a day or two I hope to ascertain that you are well again. Adieu; here is an interruption, here also is the end of the paper.-With many thanks and regards,

[Signature cut away.]²

The Construction of Sheepfolds, referred to in Carlyle’s letter, was the pamphlet issued at the same time as the present volume (March 6), in which Ruskin carries further an ecclesiastical controversy touched upon in Appendix 12. Its publication brought him into correspondence with Frederic Denison Maurice-an acquaintance which was to have some importance in Ruskin’s later carrer in connection with the Working Men’s College. The letters to Maurice, on the subject of “Sheepfolds,” of March 30 and April 25, 1851, were privately printed many years later; they will be found following the pamphlet in a later volume of this edition (Vol. XII.). For a rest after the publication of The Stones of

¹ Some book in Ruskin’s library, which Carlyle had wanted to see.

² This letter is reprinted from Mr. Collingwood’s Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 126, where for “Marsh of Gehenna,” here conjecturally read, the word is “mask.”

[Version 0.04: March 2008]