"We leave, according to our programme, for Interlachen to-day,—with great regret, for the peace and sweetness of this place are wonderful and the people are good; and though there is much drinking and quarrelling among the younger men, there appears to be neither distressful poverty, nor deliberate crime: so that there is more of the sense I need, and long for, of fellowship with human creatures, than in any place I have been at for years. I believe they don't so much as lock the house-doors at night; and the faces of the older peasantry are really very beautiful. I have done a good deal of botany, and find that wild-flower botany is more or less inexhaustible, but the cultivated flowers are infinite in their caprice. The forget-me-nots and milkworts are singularly beautiful here, but there is quite as much variety in English fields as in these, as long as one does not climb much—and I'm very lazy, compared to what I used to be,"

"LAUTERBRUNNEN, 13th June, 1866.

"We had a lovely evening here yesterday, and the children enjoyed and understood it better than anything they have yet seen among the Alps. Constance was in great glory in a little walk I took her in the twilight through the upper meadows: the Staubbach seen only as a grey veil suspended from its rock, and the great Alps pale above on the dark sky. She condescended nevertheless to gather a great bunch of the white catchfly,—to make 'pops' with,—her friend Marie at the Giesbach having shown her how a startling detonation may be obtained, by skilful management, out of its globular calyx.

"This morning is not so promising,—one of the provoking ones which will neither let you stay at home with resignation, nor go anywhere with pleasure. I'm going to take the children for a little quiet exploration of the Wengern path, to see how they like it, and if the weather betters—we may go on. At all events I hope to find an Alpine rose or two."

In June, 1866, the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford was vacant; and Ruskin's friends were anxious to see him take the post. He, however, felt no especial fitness or inclination for it, and did not stand. Three years later he was elected to a Professorship that at this time had not been founded.

After spending June in the Oberland, he went homewards through Berne, Vevey and Geneva, to find his private secretary with a bundle of begging letters, and his friend Carlyle busy with the defence of Governor Eyre.

In 1865 an insurrection of negroes at Morant Bay, Jamaica, had threatened to take the most serious shape, when it was stamped out by the high-handed measures of Mr. Eyre. After the first congratulations were over another side to the question called for a hearing. The Baptist missionaries declared that among the negroes who were shot and hanged in terrorem were peaceable subjects, respectable members of their own native congregations, for whose character they could vouch; they added that the gravity of the situation had been exaggerated by private enmity and jealousy of their work and creed. A strong committee was formed under Liberal auspices, supported by such men as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hughes, the author of "Tom Brown's Schooldays"—men whose motive was above suspicion—to bring Mr. Eyre to account.

Carlyle, who admired the strong hand, and had no interest in Baptist missionaries, accepted Mr. Eyre as the saviour of society in his West Indian sphere; and there were many, both in Jamaica and at home, who believed that, but for his prompt action, the white population would have been massacred with all the horrors of a savage rebellion. Ruskin had been for many years the ally of the Broad Church and Liberal party. But he was now coming more and more under the personal influence of Carlyle; and when it came to the point of choosing sides, declared himself, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph (December 20th, 1865), a Conservative and a supporter of order; and joined the Eyre Defence Committee with a subscription of £100. The prominent part he took, for example, in the meeting of September, 1866, was no doubt forced upon him by his desire to save Carlyle, whose recent loss and shaken nerves made such business especially trying to him. Letters of this period remain, in which Carlyle begs Ruskin to "be diligent, I bid you!"—and so on, adding, "I must absolutely shut up in that direction, to save my sanity." And so it fell to the younger man to work through piles of pamphlets and newspaper correspondence, to interview politicians and men of business, and—what was so very foreign to his habits—to take a leading share in a party agitation.

But in all this he was true to his Jacobite instincts. He had been brought up a Tory; and though he had drifted into an alliance with the Broad Church and philosophical Liberals, he was never one of them. Now that his father was gone, perhaps he felt a sort of duty to own himself his father's son; and the failure of liberal philanthropy to realise his ideals, and of liberal philosophy to rise to his economic standards, combined with Carlyle to induce him to label himself Conservative. But his conservatism could not be accepted by the party so called. Fortunately, he did not need or ask their recognition. He took no interest in party politics, and never in his life voted at a Parliamentary election. He only meant to state in the shortest terms that he stood for loyalty and order.

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