A healthier source of distraction was his drawing, in which he had received a fresh impetus from the exhibition of David Roberts' sketches in the East.

More delicate than Prout's work, entering into the detail of architectural form more thoroughly, and yet suggesting chiaroscuro with broad washes of quiet tone and touches of light, cleverly introduced--"that marvellous _pop_ of light across the foreground," Harding said of the picture of the Great Pyramid--these drawings were a mean between the limited manner of Prout and the inimitable fulness of Turner Ruskin took up the fine pencil and the broad brush, and, with that blessed habit of industry which has helped so many a one through times of trial, made sketch after sketch on the half-imperial board, finished just so far as his strength and time allowed, as they passed from the Loire to the mountains of Auvergne; and to the valley of the Rhone, and thence slowly round the Riviera to Pisa and Florence and Rome.
He was not in a mood to sympathize readily with the enthusiasms of other people.

They expected him to be delighted with the scenery, the buildings, the picture-galleries of Italy, and to forget himself in admiration.

He did admire Michelangelo; and he was interested in the back-streets and slums of the cities.

Something piquant was needed to arouse him; the mild ecstasies of common connoisseurship hardly appeal to a young man between life and death.