xliv INTRODUCTION

and symbolical significance which he found in it. The Irish friend was Lady Castletown, who, with “Irish fortune, kindness, and wit,” had sent to Ruskin’s rooms a pot of dianthus, “the flower of God,” precisely such as Carpaccio has painted on the window-sill of St. Ursula’s bedroom. Ruskin wove around the pleasant gift a web of delicate imagination, as may partly be traced in Fors Clavigera. His daily study at Venice was in Plato; every morning he read and translated some lines. “Must do my Plato,” he notes in a day of depression; “I’m never well without that.” To this disciple of Plato the divine spirit was a moving and living reality. The spiritual power of love, intermediate between the divine and the mortal, was to him, as to Socrates, “the power which interprets and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and rewards of the gods; and this power spans the chasm which divides them, and in this all is bound together.”¹ Thus did the gift “from St. Ursula” come to Ruskin with messages from his lady in heaven. “Mystical,” does some one say? or “morbid”? Perhaps, in unfavourable conditions of body and mind, the mystic strain in Ruskin’s genius might become unwholesome; but here at Venice, at the time with which we are now concerned, the effect was precisely the contrary. The links with the unseen world which Ruskin made, or which were revealed to him, fortified him, consoled, and chastened.² He notes in his diary a characteristic little touch of his better mood; for a while he ceased to be irritated or disturbed even by “the little steam devil of a boat” plying on the Grand Canal.

As the spring began to pass into early summer, Ruskin turned homewards, with his Venetian work if not fully done yet well started, and spent a month among the lakes and mountains, resuming there the botanical and geological studies which were always in his mind. Mr. Allen and one of his sons met Ruskin at Domo d’Ossola, and they botanised together. It was at Isella-in old days so beautiful a halting-place, now the Italian entrance to the Simplon Tunnel-that he sketched “the Myrtilla Regina” (his name for the whortleberry), which was engraved in Proserpina. At the Simplon inn, he made an entry in his diary, very characteristic of the mood which always came upon him in the midst of scenes of unusual beauty:-

“June 10th, Sunday.-Quite dazzling morning of old Alpine purity; sacredest light on soft pines, sacredest sound of birds and waters in the pure air, a turf of gentians on my window-still, just opening to the sun. Yesterday up the valley, that ends the gorge

¹ Symposium, 202.

² See what he says in Fors Clavigera, Letters 75 (§ 1) and 88 (§ 6).

[Version 0.04: March 2008]