"I was already deep in the 'Stones'; and clearly purpose to hold on there. A strange, unexpected, and I believe, most true and excellent Sermon in Stones—as well as the best piece of schoolmastering in Architectonics; from which I hope to learn much in a great many ways. The spirit and purport of these critical studies of yours are a singular sign of the times to me, and a very gratifying one. Right good speed to you, and victorious arrival on the farther shore! It is a quite new 'Renaissance,' I believe, we are getting into just now: either towards new, wider manhood, high again as the eternal stars; or else into final death, and the (marsh?) of Gehenna for evermore! A dreadful process, but a needful and inevitable one; nor do I doubt at all which way the issue will be, though which of the extant nations are to get included in it, and which is to be trampled out and abolished in the process, may be very doubtful. God is great: and sure enough, the changes in the 'Construction of Sheepfolds' as well as in other things, will require to be very considerable.
"We are still labouring under the foul kind of influenza here, I not far from emancipated, my poor wife still deep in the business, though I hope past the deepest. Am I to understand that you too are seized? In a day or two I hope to ascertain that you are well again. Adieu; here is an interruption, here also is the end of the paper.
"With many thanks and regards."
[Signature cut away.]
As soon as the first volume of "Stones of Venice" and the "Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds" were published, Ruskin took a short Easter holiday at Matlock, and set to work at a new edition of "Modern Painters." This was the fifth reprint of the first volume, and the third of vol. ii. They were carefully and conscientiously revised, and the Postscript indulged in a little triumph at the changed tone of public criticism upon Turner.
But it was too late to have been much service to the great artist himself. In 1845—after saying good-bye and "Why will you go to Switzerland? there will be such a fidge about you when you're gone"—Turner lost his health, and was never himself again. The last drawings he did for Ruskin (January, 1848), the "Brünig" and the "Descent from the St. Gothard to Airolo," showed his condition unmistakably; and the lonely restlessness of the last, disappointing years were, for all his friends, a melancholy ending to a brilliant career. Ruskin wrote:
"This year (1851) he has no picture on the walls of the Academy; and the Times of May 3 says: 'We miss those works of INSPIRATION'!"
"We miss! Who misses? The populace of England rolls by to weary itself in the great bazaar of Kensington,[3] little thinking that a day will come when those veiled vestals and prancing amazons, and goodly merchandise of precious stones and gold, will all be forgotten as though they had not been; but that the light which has faded from the walls of the Academy is one which a million Koh-i-noors could not rekindle; and that the year 1851 will, in the far future, be remembered less for what it has displayed, than for what it has withdrawn."
NOTE: