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beloved in heaven,-a vision whose detail and symbolism carried conviction to Ruskin’s heart.¹ While that conviction abode with him he was happy as a child; but presently he suffered what all are like to suffer who do not keep their minds close pressed to actual evidence by continuous study. That impress faded; and leaving the unseen world in its old sad uncertainty, he went back to the mission of humanising this earth, and being humanised thereby, which our race must needs accomplish, whatever be the last doom of man.”

Myers goes on to relate how “half in jest I would complain to him that to earth he gave up what was meant for Infinity, and bent a cosmic passion upon this round wet pebble of rock and sea. ‘Ah, my friend!’ he answered once when I spoke of life to come, ‘if you could only give me fifty years longer of this life on earth, I would ask for nothing more!’”² Nor did any vision of the angels in heaven seem recompense to him for what he had lost on earth. “You,” he once wrote to Miss Susan Beever, “expect to see your Margaret again, and you will be happy with her in heaven. I wanted my Rosie here. In heaven I mean to go and talk to Pythagoras and Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I shan’t care a bit for Rosie there, she needn’t think it. What will grey eyes and red cheeks be good for there?”³ At a later date the present writer, in some notes submitted to Ruskin’s criticism, had chanced to quote from William Cory’s “Mimnermus in Church”:-

“You promise heavens free from strife,

Pure truth and perfect change of will;

But sweet, sweet is this human life,

So sweet I fain would breathe it still.

Your chilly stars I can forgo:

This warm, kind world is all I know.”

The lines were new to Ruskin, and he inquired for particulars about the author of Ionica. “I like this one verse,” he said, adding characteristically, “I have never thought of stars as chilly.” A transcript of the whole piece was sent to him. “They are beautiful lines,” he wrote in reply; “so true of me also.”⁴

¹ Compare the letter to Professor Norton of January 13, 1876 (reprinted in a later volume of this edition).

² Fragments of Prose and Poetry, by Frederic W. H. Myers, 1904, pp. 90, 91.

³ Hortus Inclusus (1887), p. 18 (reprinted in a later volume of this edition).

⁴ See Pall Mall Gazette, January 3, 1891.

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