Another attachment led to his writing some of the finest parts of his most popular work, Sesame and Lilies (1864).  “I wrote Lilies,” he says, “to please one girl.”  He is here referring to Rose La Touche, a bright, ardent, religious enthusiast, to whom he began to teach drawing when she was ten years old.  His affection for her grew so strong that he finally asked her to become his wife.  He was then a man of forty while she was scarcely grown.  Her religious scruples kept her from definitely accepting him, because his belief was not sufficiently orthodox.  The attachment, however, continued until her early death.  She was in some respects a remarkable character, and he seems to have had her in mind when he wrote in Sesame and Lilies the “pearly” passage about Shakespeare’s heroines.

Although Ruskin’s wealth relieved him from earning a living, he was rarely idle.  He studied, sketched, arranged collections of minerals, prepared Turner’s pictures for the National Gallery, became professor of art at Oxford University, and wrote and lectured on art and social subjects.  His later activities, before his health gave way, were in many respects similar to those of a twentieth-century social-service worker.  The realization of the misery that overwhelmed so much of human life caused him to turn from art to consider remedies for the evils that developed as the competitive industries of the nation expanded.  He endeavored to improve the condition of the working classes in such ways as building sanitary tenements, establishing a tea shop, and forming an altruistic association, known as St. George’s Guild.  Nearly all his inheritance of L180,000 was expended in such activities.  The royalties coming from the sale of his books supported him in old age.

Ruskin suffered from periods of mental depression during his last years, which were spent at Brantwood on Coniston Water in the Lake District.  He died in 1900 at the age of eighty-one and was buried in the cemetery at Coniston.

Art Works.—­Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843, the year after he was graduated from Oxford, and the fifth and last volume, seventeen years later, in 1860.  Many of his views changed during this period; but he honestly declared them and left to his readers the task of reconciling the divergent ideas in Modern Painters.  The purpose of this book was, in his own words, “to declare the perfectness and eternal beauty of the work of God; and test all works of man by concurrence with, or subjection to that.”

Modern Painters contains painstaking descriptions of God’s handiwork in cloud formation, mountain structure, tree architecture, and water forms.  In transferring these aspects of nature to canvas, Ruskin shows the superiority of modern to ancient painting.  He emphasizes the moral basis of true beauty, and the necessity of right living as a foundation for the highest type of art.  Perhaps Modern Painters achieved its greatest success in freeing men from the bondage of a conventional criticism that was stifling art, in sending them direct to nature as a guide, and in developing a love for her varied manifestations of beauty.