INTRODUCTION xliii

and a motto from Tintoret-typical of Ruskin’s designs, ever larger than his accomplishment. His activity was unceasing, and he traversed league after league, but ever there remained, beyond, the greater sea.

The hours which Ruskin spent on the sea itself were very pleasant to him. Like other good Venetians, he loved alike the lagoons and the men who had their business on them. Among his gondolier-friends was one who came and “talked Dante” with him. To another, Rawdon Brown’s “Toni,” he was much attached. The pretty story of this gondolier’s dog is told in Fors Clavigera;¹ while the diary records other things that he learnt with pleasure from Toni. His excursions took him often to the Armenian Convent for what he considered “ the best of all views of Venice”; often, too, to the island of Sant’ Elena, now desecrated, but in Ruskin’s time still bright with its wilderness of flowers and shrubs, and monastery cloisters enclosing a garden of roses. There would Ruskin often go in autumn or spring evenings, to watch the “last gleam of sunshine, miraculous in gradated beauty, on the cloister and the red brick wall within it”; there, or to S. Giorgio in Aliga, to wait till the sunset “ended in a blaze of amber, passing up into radiant jasper-colour cirri inlaid in the blue,” with “dark masts of ships against S. Giorgio Maggiore in the west.” Yet, as he says in a poignant passage of Fors Clavigera, written at this time in Venice,² Ruskin could not wholly set himself to draw the beautiful things around him and describe them in peace. The “green tide that eddied by his threshold” was for him “full of floating corpses”; the very beauty of Venice heightened his perception of human misery and folly. “Oh me,” he writes in his diary (September 9), “if I could conquer the Shadow of Death which hurries me at work and saddens me at rest!”

There came to Ruskin, however, shadows of another kind, and to these he attributed much of the quiet energy and stimulating thoughts which he was able to throw into his work at Venice. One of the Venetian numbers of Fors Clavigera (which numbers, Letters 70-78, should be read in connexion with the present volume) begins abruptly with the statement, “Last night, St. Ursula sent me her dianthus ‘out of her bedroom window, with her love,’” and presently he adds, “(with a little personal message besides, of great importance to me...), by the hands of an Irish friend now staying here.” Several pages of his diary are given to the incident here referred to, and to the mystical

bones rest’ comes to me now, for use and bearing on the peace given by Venetian colour to piety)-Stella Maris: 1. The Laws of Fesole, 2. The Laws of Rivo Alto, with its motto from Tintoret, ‘Sempre si fa il mare maggiore.’”

¹ See Letter 75.

² Letter 72, §§ 2, 3.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]