In a few days we went to Basle, and, after a rest, my vision came back partially, and we went to Laufenburg, where Turner had found the subject for one of his Liber Studiorum engravings.  Here the subjects were entirely after my feeling, and, as my eyes had ceased to trouble me, I set to work on a large drawing of the town and fall from below.  In the midst of it the snapping behind my eyes came back, worse than ever, and that time not to leave me for a long time.  It was followed by an incessant headache, which made life a burden, with obstinate indigestion.  Here Ruskin suddenly found that he must go back to England, and I returned with him as far as Geneva, and thence went to St. Martin, where I spent the rest of the autumn, as helpless for all work as a blind man.

My summer with Ruskin, to which I had looked for so much profit to my art, had ended in a catastrophe of which I did not then even measure the extent.  It was nearly two years before I recovered from the attack at Neuchatel enough to work regularly, and these circumstances threw me still further from my chosen career.  More exciting and absorbing occupation called me, and I obeyed, whether for better or worse it now matters not.  When I was free to return with undivided attention to my painting my enthusiasm had cooled, and human interests claimed and kept me.  Ruskin had dragged me from my old methods, and given me none to replace them.  I lost my faith in myself, and in him as a guide to art, and we separated definitely, years later, on a personal question in which he utterly misunderstood me; but, apart from questions of art, he always remains to me one of the largest and noblest of all the men I have known, liberal and generous beyond limit, with a fineness of sympathy in certain directions and delicacy of organization quite womanly.  Nothing could shake my admiration for his moral character or abate my reverence for him as a humanist.  That art should have been anything more than a side interest with him, and that he should have thrown the whole energy of his most energetic nature into the reforming of it, was a misfortune to him and to the world, but especially to me.

At St. Martin I waited the return of my vision.  I climbed, and tried chamois-hunting with no success so far as game was concerned, though I saw the beautiful creatures in their homes, and now rejoice that I did not kill any, though I fear I wounded one mortally, where we could not retrieve him.  One of my excursions was to the summit of the Aiguille de Varens, by a path, in one place cut in the face of a precipice, only wide enough for one’s feet, with sheer cliff above and below, and nothing to hold by.  I have a good head, but to follow my guide on that path was something which only mauvaise honte brought me to.  I was ashamed to hesitate where he walked along so cheerily.  We arranged to spend the night at a chalet where a milkmaid with the figure of the Venus of Milo tended a remnant of the herd, most of