But it was this winter's study of the "Liber Studiorum" that started him on his own characteristic course; and while we have no pen-and-wash work of his before 1845 (except a few experiments after Prout), we find him now using the pen continually during the "Modern Painters" period.
On reaching the Lake of Geneva he wrote, or sketched, one of his best-known pieces of verse, "Mont Blanc Revisited," and a few other poems followed, the last of the long series which had once been his chief interest and aim in life.

With this lonely journey there came new and deeper feelings; with his increased literary power, fresh resources of diction; and he was never so near being a poet as when he gave up writing verse.

Too condensed to be easily understood, too solemn in their movement to be trippingly read, the lines on "The Arve at Cluse," on "Mont Blanc," and "The Glacier," should not be passed over as merely rhetorical.

And the reflections on the loungers at Conflans ("Why Stand ye here all the Day Idle ?") are full of the spirit in which he was gradually approaching the great problems of his life, to pass through art into the earnest study of human conduct and its final cause.
He was still deeply religious--more deeply so than before, and found the echo of his own thoughts in George Herbert, with whom he "communed in spirit" while he travelled through the Alps.

But the forms of outward religion were losing their hold over him in proportion as his inward religion became more real and intense.