The following story of a young Florentine girl’s too short life is absolutely and simply true: it was written only for memorial of her among her friends, by the one of them that loved her best, and who knew her perfectly. That it was not written for publication will be felt after reading a few sentences; and I have had a certain feeling of desecrating its humility of affection, ever since I asked leave to publish it.
In the close of the first lecture given on my return to my duties in Oxford, will be found all that I am minded at present to tell concerning the writer, and her friends among the Italian poor; and perhaps I, even thus, have told more than I ought, though not in the least enough to express my true regard and respect for her, or my admiration of her powers of rendering, with the severe industry of an engraver, the most pathetic instants of action and expression in the person she loves. Her drawing of Ida, as she lay asleep in the evening of the last day of the year 1872, has been very beautifully and attentively, yet not without necessary loss, reduced in the frontispiece, by Mr. W. Roffe, from its own size, three-quarters larger;—and thus, strangely, and again let me say, providentially, I can show, in the same book, examples of the purest truth, both in history, and picture. Of invented effects of light and shade on imaginary scenes, it seems to me we have admired too many. Here is a real passage of human life, seen in the light that Heaven sent for it.
One earnest word only I have to add here, for the reader’s sake,—let it be noted with thankful reverence that this is the story of a Catholic girl written by a Protestant one, yet the two of them so united in the Truth of the Christian Faith, and in the joy of its Love, that they are absolutely unconscious of any difference in the forms or letter of their religion.
J. Ruskin.
Brantwood, 14th April, 1883.
THE STORY OF IDA
