INTRODUCTION xxxiii

country to country, from age to age, from element to element, he leads the way; while his audience, laughing, delighted, follows with scrambling thoughts and apprehensions and flying leaps, he meanwhile illustrating each delightful, fanciful, dictatorial sentence with pictures by the way-things, facts, objects interwoven, bookcases opening wide, sliding drawers unlocked with his own marvellous keys-and lo!... We are perhaps down in the centre of the earth, far below Brantwood and its surrounding hills, among specimens, minerals, and precious stones, Ruskin still going ahead, and crying “Sesame” and “Sesame,” and revealing each secret recess of his king’s treasury in turn, pointing to each tiny point of light and rainbow veiled in marble, gold and opal, crystal and emerald. Then, again, while we are wondering, and barely beginning to apprehend his delightful illustrations, the lecturer changes from natural things to those of art, from veins of gold meandering in the marble, and, speaking of past ages, to coins marking the history of man. I was specially struck by some lovely old Holbein pieces of Henry VIII. which he brought out. I can still see Ruskin’s hand holding the broad gold mark in its palm.”¹

No other pen, I think, has caught so well as Miss Thackeray’s the notes of Ruskin’s manner. Its charm, abandon, copiousness were the spontaneous expression of a nature richly endowed, yet they were fed also by constant thoughts of duty and reverence. Miss Thackeray’s picture of Ruskin at his tea-table may be supplemented by a note from his diary: “As I was eating my last bit of bread, looking at the sky and thinking, what I have often thought before, that all bread should be eaten ‘in remembrance of Me,’ and so, whether we eat or drink, all should be done to the glory of God,-it came to me that if we do not this, we must, in all we eat or drink, do all to the glory of the devil.”² And as one reads of Ruskin’s cheerful talk and happy ways, one must not forget the understrain of effort, trial, and selfsearching, which colours almost every page of his private communings at this time. “My own mind,” he writes on one page, “is in a quite discomfited and disgraced state ... except only in taking shame to itself for all failure, and resigning itself to what of distress it has to bear and to what pleasure it can take, my clear duty being now to be as happy as I can; so redeeming what I can of the past which has been so lost or miserable, happy for the sake of others always, without wanting, for pride’s sake, that they should know how hard it costs to be happy. Not but that I’ve more capacity in that kind

¹ From Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning, by Anne Ritchie, 1892, pp. 66-76. Another account of an evening at Brantwood, at about the same date-by the late Professor Gurney of Harvard University-is printed at vol. ii. pp. 134-135 of the Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton.

² Entry at Venice, December 28, 1876. Compare Fors Clavigera, Letter 74, § 9.

XXIV. C

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