SOURCE: "Ruskin's Finale: Vision and Imagination in Praeterita," in ELH, Vol. 57, No. 3, Fall, 1990, pp. 665-83.

In the following essay, Peltason examines Ruskin's last work, Praeterita, which he wrote after he had suffered several bouts of mental illness.

Like the "Mutabilitie Cantos" or the last awkward bow of Keats's letters, the final paragraphs of John Ruskin's Praeterita have a conclusive rightness that cannot easily be ascribed either to chance or to design. The book stops well short of its projected length, just four chapters into a third volume, but at a moment in Ruskin's troubled history when he knew that any words he wrote might be his last. To follow closely the rise and fall and associative flow of these two remarkable paragraphs is to be drawn backward into the rest of Praeterith and into the whole tangled discussion in Ruskin's writings of the familiar mystery that combines chance...