John Ruskin

“ I have all your letters, and rejoice in them; though it is a little sadder for you looking at empty Brantwood, than for me to fancy the bright full Thwaite, and then it's a great shame that I've everything to amuse me, and lovely Louvres and shops and cathedrals and coquettes and pictures and plays and prettinesses of every color and quality, and you've only your old, old hills and quiet lake. ”

“ An Alpine stream, besides, nearly always has its bed full of loose stones, and becomes a series of humps and dumps of water wherever it is shallow; while the Wharfe swept round its curves of shore like a black Damascus saber, coiled into eddies of steel. At the Strid, it had risen eight feet vertical since yesterday, sheeting the flat rocks with foam from side to side, while the treacherous mid-channel was filled with a succession of boiling domes of water, charged through and through with churning white, and rolling out into the broader stream, each like a vast sea wave bursting on a beach. ”

“ The walls of Pompeii are covered with paintings meant only to give pleasure, but nothing they represent is beautiful or delightful, and yesterday, among other calumniated and caricatured birds, I saw one of my Susie's pets, a peacock; and he had only eleven eyes in his tail. Fancy the feverish wretchedness of the humanity which in mere pursuit of pleasure or power had reduced itself to see no more than eleven eyes in a peacock's tail! ”

“ But for all of us, a dark sky is assuredly a poisonous and depressing power, which neither surgery nor medicine can resist. The difference to me between nature as she is now, and as she was ten years ago, is as great as between Lapland and Italy, and the total loss of comfort in morning and evening sky, the most difficult to resist of all spiritual hostility. ”

“ It is very dreadful to live in Italy, and more dreadful to see one's England and one's English friends, all but a field or two, and a stream or two, and a one Susie and one Dr. Brown, fast becoming like Italy and the Italians.
[Pg 15]
I have too much sympathy with your sorrow to write to you of it. What I have not sympathy with, is your hope; and how cruel it is to say this! But I am driven more and more to think there is to be no more good for a time, but a reign of terror of men and the elements alike ”

“ The perfection of the stone, its exquisite color, and superb weight, and flawless clearness, and the delicate cutting, which makes the light flash from it like a wave of the Lake, make it altogether the most perfect mineralogical and heraldic jewel that Joanie could be bedecked with, and it is as if Susie had given her a piece of Coniston Water itself. ”

“ If you only knew the good your peacock's feathers have done me, and if you could only see the clever drawing I'm making of one from the blue breast! You know what lovely little fern or equisetum stalks of sapphire the filaments are; they beat me so, but they're coming nice.
That is so intensely true what you say about Turner's work being like nature's in its slowness and tenderness. I always think of him as a great natural force in a human frame. ”

“ I have come to the conclusion that bees go more by sight than by scent. As I stand by my peacock with his gloriously gorgeous tail all spread out, a bee comes right at it (very vulgar, but expressive) ; and I have an Alpine Primula on this window stone brightly in flower, and a bee came and alighted, but went away again at once, not finding the expected honey. I wonder what you do the livelong day, for I know you and idleness are not acquaintances. I am so sorry your favorite places are spoiled. But dear Brantwood will grow prettier and prettier under your care. ”

“ The sight of all this and my own shameful comforts, three wax candles and blazing fire and dry roof, and Susie and Joanie for friends!
Oh me, Susie, what is to become of me in the next world, who have in this life all my good things! ”

“ It is a marvelous fact in natural history.
The wind is singing a wild tune to-night—cannot be colder on our own heaths—and the waves dash like our Waterhead. Oh me, when I'm walking round it again how like a sad dream all this Venice will be! ”

“ At length the robins have built a nest in the ivy in our yard—a very secure and sheltered place, and a very convenient distance from the crumb market. Like the old woman he sings with a merry devotion, and she thinks there never was such music, as she sits upon her eggs; he comes again and again, with every little dainty that his limited income allows, and she thinks it all the sweeter because he brings it to her. Now and then she leaves her nest to stretch her wings, and to shake off the dust of care, and to prevent her pretty ankles being cramped. ”

“ It is a long while since I've felt so good for nothing as I do this morning. My very wristbands curl up in a dog's-eared and disconsolate manner; my little room is all a heap of disorder. I've got a hoarseness and wheezing and sneezing and coughing and choking. I can't speak and I can't think, I'm miserable in bed and useless out of it; and it seems to me as if I could never venture to open a window or go out of a door any more. I have the dimmest sort of diabolical pleasure in thinking how miserable I shall make Susie by telling her all this ”

“ Loadstones they were, as steadily bringing the light of gentle and wise souls about them as the crest of their guardian mountain gives pause to the morning clouds: in themselves, they were types of perfect womanhood in its constant happiness, queens alike of their own hearts and of a Paradise in which they knew the names and sympathized with the spirits of every living creature that God had made to play therein, or to blossom in its sunshine or shade. ”

“ I'm horribly sulky this morning, for I expected to have a room with a view, if the room was ever so little, and I've got a great big one looking into the Castle yard, and I feel exactly as if I was in a big modern county jail with beautiful turrets of modern Gothic.
I came to see Prince Leopold, who has been a prisoner to his sofa lately, but I trust he is better; he is very bright and gentle, under severe and almost continual pain. My dear little Susie, about that rheumatism of yours? ”

“ The fishpond stream is very doleful, and wants to dance with daffodils if they would come and teach it. How happy we are in our native streams. A thunder-storm swelled the Tiber yesterday, and it rolled over its mill weirs in heaps, literally, of tossed water, the size of haycocks, but black brown like coffee with the grounds in it, mixed with a very little yellow milk. In some lights the foam flew like cast handfuls of heavy gravel. The chief flowers here are only broom and bindweed, and I begin to weary for my heather and for my Susie ”

“ I take great care of myself, be quite sure of that, Susie; the worst of it is, here in Assisi everybody else wants me to take care of them.
Catharine brought me up as a great treat yesterday at dinner, ham dressed with as much garlic as could be stewed into it, and a plate of raw figs, telling me I was to eat them together!
The sun is changing the entire mountains of Assisi into a hot bottle with no flannel round it; but I can't get a ripe plum, peach, or cherry. All the milk turns sour, and one has to eat one's meat at its toughest or the thunder gets into it next day. ”

“ I made a little sketch of the lake from above the Waterhead which goes everywhere with me, and it is so curious when the wind blows the leaf open when I am sketching here at Beauvais, where all is so differently delightful, as if we were on the other side of the world.
I think I shall be able to write some passages about architecture yet, which Susie will like. I hear of countless qualities being discovered in the new little Susie! And all things will be happy for me if you send me a line to Hotel Meurice saying you are happy too. ”

“ Did you think of your own quotation from Homer, when you told me that field of yours was full of violets? But where are the four fountains of white water?—through a meadow full of violets and parsley? How delicious Calypso's fire of finely chopped cedar! How shall I thank you for allowing me, Susie the little, to distill your writings? Such a joy and comfort to me—for I shall need much very soon now. I [Pg 94] do so thank and love you for it; I am sure I may say so to you. I rejoice again and again that I have such a friend. May I never love him less, never prove unworthy of his friendship! ”

“ May you lay up a great stock of good health and receive much good in many ways, and then return to those who so much miss you, and by whom you are so greatly beloved.
Coniston would go into your heart if you could see it now—so very lovely, the oak trees so early, nearly in leaf already. Your beloved blue hyacinths will soon be out, and the cuckoo has come, but it is long since Susie has been out. She only stands at an open window, but she must try next week to go into the garden ”

“ It is a sight that always redeems me to what I am capable of at my poor little best, and to what loves and memories are most precious to me. So I write to you, one of the few true loves left. The snow has fallen fresh on the hills, and it makes me feel that I must soon be seeking shelter at Brantwood and the Thwaite. ”

“ Nothing silences me so much as sorrow, and for this of yours I have no comfort. I write only that you may know that I am thinking of you, and would help you if I could. And I write to-day because your lovely letters and your lovely old age have been forced into my thoughts often by dreadful contrast during these days in Italy. You who are so purely and brightly happy in all natural and simple things, seem now to belong to another and a younger world. ”

“ It is blue like the air that you were born into, and always live in. It is as deep as gentians, and has their gleams of green in it, and it is precious all through within and without, as Susie herself is. ”

“ I never thought the large packet was from you; it was thrown aside with the rest, till evening, and only opened then by chance. I was greatly grieved to find what I had thus left unacknowledged. The drawings are entirely beautiful and wonderful, but, like all the good work done in those bygone days, (Donovan's own book being of inestimable excellence in this kind,) they affect me with profound melancholy in the thought of the loss to the entire body of the nation of all this perfect artistic capacity, and sweet will, for want of acknowledgment, system, and direction. ”

“ I am very thankful that the "Venice" gives you so much pleasure.
I have, at least, one certainty, which few authors could hold so surely, that no one was ever harmed by a book of mine; they may have been offended, but have never been discouraged or discomforted, still less corrupted.
[Pg 67]
There's a saucy speech for Susie's friend. You won't like me any more if I begin to talk like that.
A sapphire is the same stone as a ruby; both are the pure earth of clay crystallized. No one knows why one is red and the other blue.
A diamond is pure coal crystallized. ”

“ It has been carried about in my pocket to be finished, and I see there's no room for the least bit of love at the bottom. So here's a leaf full from the Bois de Boulogne, which is very lovely; and we drive about by night or day, as if all the sky were only the roof of a sapphire palace set with warm stars. ”

“ I was thinking over that question of yours, "What did I think?" [13] But, my dear Susie, you might as well [Pg 19] ask Gibbie Gellatly what he thought. What does it matter what any of us think? We are but simpletons, the best of us, and I am a very inconsistent and wayward simpleton. I know how to roast eggs, in the ashes, perhaps—but for the next world! Why don't you ask your squirrel what he thinks too? The great point—the one for all of us—is, not to take false words in our mouths, and to crack our nuts innocently through winter and rough weather. ”

“ So if I can only make a dog happy (as you do, only you take yours to live with you, and I cannot do that) it is a pleasant thing. I do so like to make things happier, and I should like to put bunches of hay in the fields for the poor horses, for there is very scant supply of grass, and too many for the supply.
1st May.
I cannot longer refrain from writing to you, my dear kind friend, so often are you in my thoughts. Dearest Joanie has told you, I doubt not, and I know how sorry you are, and how truly you are feeling for your poor Susie. So knowing that I will say no more about my sorrow. ”

“ I don't understand how the strange cat came to love you so quickly, after one dinner and a rest by the fire! I should have thought an ill-treated and outcast animal would have regarded everything as a trap, for a month at least,—dined in tremors, warmed itself with its back to the fire, watching the door, and jumped up the chimney if you stepped on the rug. ”

“ It sounds all too good to be true; but the good people are positive of it, and so's the great Pyramid, and the Book of Daniel, and the "Bible of Amiens." You can't possibly believe in any more promises of mine, I know, but if I do come to see you this day week, don't think it's a ghost; and believe at least that we all love you and rejoice in your birthday wherever we are. ”