“I had never heard my father’s or mother’s voice once raised in any question with each other ...  I had never heard a servant scolded ...  I obeyed word or lifted finger, of father or mother, simply as a ship her helm ...nothing was ever promised me that was not given; nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever told me that was not true...  Peace, obedience, faith; these three for chief good; next to these, the habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind.”

He grew up a solitary child without playmates.  This solitude was relieved when his parents took him on occasional trips through England, Switzerland, and Italy.  In Praeterita he tells in an inimitable way how the most portentious interruption to his solitude came in 1836, when his father’s Spanish partner came with his four beautiful daughters to visit Herne Hill.  These were the first girls in his own station to whom he had spoken.  “Virtually convent-bred more closely than the maids themselves,” says Ruskin, “I was thrown, bound hand and foot, in my unaccomplished simplicity, into the fiery furnace.”  In four days he had fallen so desperately in love with the oldest, Clotilde Adele Domecq, a “graceful blonde” of fifteen, that he was more than four years in recovering his equilibrium.  She laughed at his protestations of love; but she repeatedly visited his parents, and he did not give up hope until 1840, when she married a French baron.  His biographer says that the resulting “emotional strain doubtless was contributory to his breakdown at Oxford” and to his enforced absence for a recuperative trip on the continent.

His feminine attachments usually showed some definite results in his writing.  Miss Domecq’s influence during the long period of his devotion inspired him to produce much verse, which received such high praise that his father desired him to become a poet.  Although some of Ruskin’s verse was good, he finally had the penetration to see that it ranked decidedly below the greatest, and he later laid down the dictum:  “with second-rate poetry in quality no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind.”  In 1886, he had the humor to allude as follows to Miss Domecq and her influence on his rimes, “...her sisters called her Clotilde, after the queen-saint, and I, Adele, because it rimed to shell, spell, and knell.”

Before he was graduated from Oxford in 1842, he wrote the beautiful altruistic story, The King of the Golden River (1841) for Euphemia Gray, the young girl unhappily chosen by his mother to become his wife.  He married her in 1848, but was divorced from her in 1854.  In 1855 she was married to the Pre-Raphaelite artist, John Millais.