xxii INTRODUCTION

The experiments on the glaciers with cream will recur when we come to Deucalion;¹ but there were other experiments at Broadlands which had a profounder influence. Mrs. Cowper Temple was a devout believer in spiritualism. In earlier years he had attended séances with her, without, however, being firmly persuaded.² Perhaps this is a region in which the will to believe is an essential condition of belief, and Ruskin was now in a mood to lend himself, not unwillingly, to experiments. Broadlands had been the scene of some of his happiest hours, for there he had been wont to meet the girl he loved. His friend was eagerly persuaded that the partition between the life of this world and the spirit world was impenetrable only to the hard in heart. Gradually the conviction was borne in upon him also. He notes the conclusive dates in his diary:-

“December 14.-Heard from Mrs. A-(in the drawing-room where I was once so happy) the most overwhelming evidence of the other state of the world that has ever come to me; and am this morning like a flint stone suddenly changed into a firefly, and ordered to flutter about in a bramble thicket. Yet slept well and sound all night.”

“December 18.-Increasing anxiety about illness, and more and more wonderful or sad things told me unfit me much for my work.... Mrs. W-sees me in evening, filh throwing her into trance, tells me all things that ever I did.”

“December 20.-Again, first through filh and her friend, then conclusively in evening talk after reading, the truth is shown to me, which, though blind, I have truly sought,-so long.”

What was this truth and how much of it was shown to him, and in what guise? Frederic Myers, who was of the company at Broadlands and whom Ruskin presently visited at Cambridge, has told us something of the revelation:-

“Chiefliest I think of him,” he wrote to the Psychical Research Society, “in that house of high thoughts where his interest in our inquiry first upgrew. For the introduction to the new hope came to him, as to Edmund Gurney and to myself, through a lady whom each of us held in equal honour; and it was on the stately lawns of Broadlands, and in that air as of Sabbatical repose, that Ruskin enjoyed his one brief season,-since the failure of his youthful Christian confidence,-of blissful trust in the Unseen. To one among that company a vision came,-as of a longed-for meeting of souls

¹ Chapter iii. (“Of Ice Cream”); and see ibid., i. ch. vii. § 23.

² See Vol. XVIII. pp. xxxi.-xxxiii.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]