CHAPTER IV.
MOUNTAIN-WORSHIP (1830-1835) Critics who are least disposed to give Ruskin credit for his artistic doctrines or economical theories unite in allowing that he taught his generation to look at Nature, and especially at the sublime in Nature--at storms and sunrises, and the forests and snows of the Alps.
This mission of mountain-worship was the outcome of a passion beside which the other interests and occupations of his youth were only toys.
He could take up his mineralogy and his moralizing and lay them down, but the love of mountain scenery was something beyond his control.

We have seen him leave his heart in the Highlands at three years old; we have now to follow his passionate pilgrimages to Skiddaw and Snowdon, to the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc.
They had planned a great tour through the Lakes and the North two years before, but were stopped at Plymouth by the news of Mrs.Richardson's death.

At last the plan was carried out.

A prose diary was written alternately by John and Mary, one carrying it on when the other tired, with rather curious effect of unequally-yoked collaboration.

We read how they "set off from London at seven o'clock on Tuesday morning, the 18th May," and thenceforward we are spared no detail: the furniture of the inns; the bills of fare; when they got out of the carriage and walked; how they lost their luggage; what they thought of colleges and chapels, music and May races at Oxford, of Shakespeare's tomb, and the pin-factory at Birmingham; we have a complete guide-book to Blenheim and Warwick Castle, to Haddon and Chatsworth, and the full itinerary of Derbyshire.