[The Life of John Ruskin by W. G. Collingwood]@TWC D-Link book
The Life of John Ruskin

CHAPTER IV
10/11

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.


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