During the next few years he lived much alone among the Alps, or at home, thinking out the problem; sometimes feeling, far more acutely than was good for clear thought, the burden of the mission that was laid upon him.

In March, 1863, he wrote from his retreat at Mornex to Norton: "The loneliness is very great, and the peace in which I am at present is only as if I had buried myself in a tuft of grass on a battlefield wet with blood--for the cry of the earth about me is in my ears continually, if I do not lay my head to the very ground." And a few months later: "I am still very unwell, and tormented between the longing for rest and lovely life, and the sense of this terrific call of human crime for resistance and of human misery for help, though it seems to me as the voice of a river of blood which can but sweep me down in the midst of its black clots, helpless." Sentences like these, passages here and there in the last volume of "Modern Painters," and still more, certain passages omitted from that volume, show that about 1860 something of a cloud had been settling over him,--a sense of the evil of the world, a horror of great darkness.

In his earlier years, his intense emotion and vivid imagination had enabled him to read into pictures of Tintoret or Turner, into scenes of nature and sayings of great books, a meaning or a moral which he so vividly communicated to the reader as to make it thenceforward part and parcel of the subject, however it came there to begin with.

It is useless to wonder whether Turner, for instance, consciously meant what Ruskin found in his works.

A great painter does not paint without thought, and such thought is apt to show itself whether he will or no.