"Nor did I painfully wish what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toy-shops. I had a bunch of keys to play with as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older I had a cart and a ball, and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the square and comparing the colors of my carpet, examining the knots in the wood of the floors, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses, with rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart through its leathern pipe from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge, or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed-covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources; and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet."
He was once taken when a child to the brow of the crags overlooking Derwentwater, and he tells of the "intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in looking through the hollows in the mossy roots over the crag into the dark lake, and which has associated itself more or less with all twining roots of trees ever since." He also speaks of his joy in first treading on the grass; and, indeed, each fresh bit of acquaintance which he made with Nature gave him unbounded delight. He says in his late "Recollections:"—
"To my further great benefit, as I grew older I saw nearly all the noblemen's houses in England, in reverent and healthy delight of uncovetous admiration,—perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a small house and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at; but that, at all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the least more pleasantly habitable to pull Warwick Castle down. And at this day, though I have kind invitations enough to visit America, I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles."
Again he says:—
"For the best and truest beginning of all blessings, I had been taught the perfect meaning of Peace, in thought, act, and word. Angry words, hurry, and disorder I never knew in the stillness of my childhood's home. Next to this quite priceless gift of Peace, I had received the perfect understanding of the natures of Obedience and Faith. I obeyed word or lifted finger of father or mother, simply as a ship her helm; not only without idea of resistance, but receiving the direction as a part of my own life and force,—a helpful law, as necessary to me in every moral action as the law of gravity in leaping. And my practice in Faith was soon complete; nothing was ever promised me that was not given, nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever told me that was not true."
Ruskin's father began to read Byron to him soon after he entered his teens, the first passage being the shipwreck in "Don Juan."
"I recollect that he and my mother looked across the table at each other with something of alarm, when on asking me a few festas afterwards what we should have for after-dinner reading, I instantly answered, 'Juan and Haidee.' My selection was not adopted, and feeling there was something wrong somewhere, I did not press it, attempting even some stutter of apology, which made matters worse. Perhaps I was given a bit of 'Childe Harold' instead, which I liked at that time nearly as well; and, indeed, the story of Haidee soon became too sad for me. But very certainly by the end of this year, 1834, I knew my Byron pretty well all through. . . . I never got the slightest harm from Byron; what harm came to me was from the facts of life and from books of a baser kind, including a wide range of the works of authors popularly considered extremely instructive,—from Victor Hugo down to Dr. Watts."
Byron became a great favorite with the young student, as will be seen from the following passage:—
"I rejoiced in all the sarcasm of 'Don Juan.' But my firm decision, as soon as I got well into the later cantos of it, that Byron was to be my master in verse, as Turner in color, was made, of course, in that gosling, or say cygnet, epoch of existence, without consciousness of the deeper instincts that prompted it. Only two things I consciously recognized,—that his truth of observation was the most exact and his chosen expression the most concentrated that I had yet found in literature. By that time my father had himself put me through the first two books of Livy, and I knew, therefore, what close-set language was; but I saw then that Livy, as afterward that Horace and Tacitus, were studiously, often laboriously, and sometimes obscurely concentrated; while Byron wrote, as easily as a hawk flies and as clearly as a lake reflects, the exact truth in the precisely narrowest terms,—not only the exact truth, but the most central and useful one. Of course I could no more measure Byron's greater powers at that time than I could Turner's; but I saw that both were right, in all things that I knew right from wrong in, and that they must henceforth be my masters, each in his own domain. But neither the force and precision nor the rhythm of Byron's language was at all the central reason for my taking him for master. Knowing the Song of Moses and the Sermon on the Mount by heart, and half the Apocalypse besides, I was in no need of tutorship either in the majesty or simplicity of English words; and for their logical arrangement I had had Byron's own master, Pope, since I could lisp. But the thing wholly new and precious to me in Byron was his measured and living truth,—measured as compared with Homer, and living as compared with everybody else."
He began to be an observer of beauty at a very early age, and then, as afterwards, placed beauty first, utility second. He says:—