[Footnote 34:  “The Simple Dynamic Conditions of Glacial Action among the Alps,” March 11, 1875.]

[Footnote 35:  “Social Policy based on Natural Selection,” May 11.]

At the end of May she died.  On the 1st of June the Royal party honoured the Slade Professor with their visit—­little knowing how valueless to him such honours had become.  He went north[36] and met his translators at Brantwood to finish the Xenophon,—­and to help dig his harbour and cut coppice in his wood.  He prepared a preface; but the next term was one of greater pressure, with the twelve lectures on Sir Joshua Reynolds to deliver.  He wrote, after Christmas: 

[Footnote 36:  “On a posting tour through Yorkshire”.  He made three such tours in 1875—­southward in January, northward in June and July, and southward in September:  and another northward in April and May, 1876.]

“Now that I have got my head fairly into this Xenophon business, it has expanded into a new light altogether; and I think it would be absurd in me to slur over the life in one paragraph.  A hundred things have come into my head as I arrange the dates, and I think I can make a much better thing of it—­with a couple of days’ work.  My head would not work in town—­merely turned from side to side—­never nodded (except sleepily).  I send you the proofs just to show you I’m at work.  I’m going to translate all the story of Delphic answer before Anabasis:  and his speech after the sleepless night.”

Delphic answers—­for he was then again brought into contact with “spiritualism”; and sleepless nights—­for the excitement of overwork was telling upon him—­were becoming too frequent in his own experience; and yet the lectures on Reynolds went off with success.[37] The magic of his oratory transmuted the scribbled jottings of his MS. into a magnificent flow of rolling paragraph and rounded argument that thrilled a captious audience with unwonted emotion, and almost persuaded many a hearer to accept the gospel of “the Ethereal Ruskin.”  In spite of a sense of antagonism to his surroundings, he did useful work which none other could do in the University.  That this was acknowledged was proved by his re-election, early in 1876:  but his third term of three years was a time of weakened health.  Repeated absence from his post and inability to fulfil his duties made it obviously his wisest course, at the end of that term, to resign the Slade Professorship.

[Footnote 37:  Nov. 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 23, 25, and 27; 1875.]

CHAPTER IV

ST. GEORGE AND ST. MARK (1875-1877)

In the book his Bertha of Canterbury was reading at twilight on the Eve of St. Mark, Keats might have been describing “Fors.”  Among its pages, fascinating with their golden broideries of romance and wit, perplexing with mystic vials of wrath as well as all the Seven Lamps and Shekinah of old and new Covenants commingled, there was gradually unfolded the plan of “St. George’s Work.”