INTRODUCTION xxxi

(Letter to Lady Mount Temple.) “GRETA BRIDGE, 3rd May, ‘76-I have had nothing to tell you, till to-day, of good, but at last the sun has come, and the old Inn here is unchanged, and there is a window looking through blossom into the garden and up to Brignall woods, and I had a walk up the glen yesterday, wholly quite-nothing with voice of harm, or voice anywise, except the Greta and the birds; and I found, up the glen, the little Brignal churchyard with its ruined chapel, and low stone wall just marking its sacred ground from the rest of the violets, and the chapel untouched, since Cromwell’s time, the river shining and singing through the east window, and the fallen walls scarcely higher than a sheepfold, but the little piscina and a stone or two of the altar left, and the window and wall so overgrown with my own Madonna herb¹ that one would think the little ghost had been at work planting them all the spring. And it’s still lovely to-day, and I’m going to take Joan to see it. Please send me a little line to Brantwood.”

Ruskin was now in Turner’s country, and in Scott’s, and he was delighted, as ever, in tracing the artist’s fidelity to nature. “Found Turner’s view accurately,” he notes in his diary (May 3); “quiet tea, with clear twilight over the woods of Mortham, seen over little garden and waved mountain field, and the blossoming sprays and sharp cherry leaves, motionless and round the window frame.” And so again, two days later: “Saw Junction [of Greta and Tees]² and Greta bed yesterday; exquisite beyond words. Turner so right!”

From Greta they drove across by Brough to Patterdale, and so home to Brantwood. “I sad all the way,” says Ruskin in his diary (May 6), “thinking of old times, and the different joy.”³ Yet at Brantwood also, during this period (1875-1876), there were often golden days, and Ruskin to friends and acquaintances was cheerful and full of interest. It was at this time that Coventry Patmore visited him, and enjoyed, as we have seen, much talk with his host.⁴ A little later came his Oxford pupils, to go through their translation of Xenophon’s Economist with him, and help in building his harbour (Vol. XXVIII. p. xxiv.). Entries in his diary for July 1876 mention visits from Leslie Stephen and his sister-in-law, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie (Miss Thackeray), who were staying at a neighbouring farm-house. These

¹ See the drawing of the herb, Plate XVII. in Vol. XIX. (p. 377).

² See Vol. XXI. p. 11 and n.

³ It was on his return from this driving tour that Ruskin wrote his preface (reprinted in a later volume of this edition) to Robert Somervell’s Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District.

⁴ Vol. XXIII. pp. xxvi., xxvii.

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