There you have our author ready made, with his ever-fresh interest in everything, and all-attempting eagerness, out of which the first thing that crystallizes into any definite shape is the verse-writing.

CHAPTER III

PERFERVIDUM INGENIUM (1826-1830)

The first dated “poem” was written a month before little John Ruskin reached the age of seven.  It is a tale of a mouse, in seven octosyllabic couplets, “The Needless Alarm,” remarkable only for an unexpected correctness in rhyme, rhythm, and reason.

His early verse owes much to the summer tours, which were prolific in notes; everything was observed and turned into verse.  The other inspiring source was his father—­the household deity of both wife and child, whose chief delight was in his daily return from the city, and in his reading to them in the drawing-room at Herne Hill.  John was packed into a recess, where he was out of the way and the draught; he was barricaded by a little table that held his own materials for amusement, and if he liked to listen to the reading, he had the chance of hearing good literature, the chance sometimes of hearing passages from Byron and Christopher North and Cervantes, rather beyond his comprehension, for his parents were not of the shockable sort:  with all their religion and strict Scotch morality, they could laugh at a broad jest, as old-fashioned people could.

So he associated his father and his father’s readings with the poetry of reflection, as he associated the regular summer round with the poetry of description.  As every summer brought its crop of description, so against the New Year (for, being Scotch, they did not then keep our Christmas) and against his father’s birthday in May he used always to prepare some little drama or story or “address” of a reflective nature, beginning with the verses on “Time,” written for New Year’s Day, 1827.

That year they were again at Perth, and on their way home some early morning frost suggested the not ungraceful verses on the icicles at Glenfarg.  By a childish misconception, the little boy seems to have confused the real valley that interested him so with Scott’s ideal Glendearg, and, partly for this reason, to have found a greater pleasure in “The Monastery,” which he thereupon undertook to paraphrase in verse.  There remain some hundreds of doggerel rhymes; but his affection for that particular novel survived the fatal facility of his octosyllabics, and reappears time after time in his later writings.

Next year, 1828, their tour was stopped at Plymouth by the painful news of the death of his aunt Jessie, to whom they were on their way.  It was hardly a year since the bright little cousin, Jessie of Perth, had died of water on the brain.  She had been John’s especial pet and playfellow, clever, like him, and precocious; and her death must have come to his parents as a warning, if they needed it, to