“My own feeling, now, is that everything which has hitherto happened to me, and been done by me, whether well or ill, has been fitting me to take greater fortune more prudently, and to do better work more thoroughly.  And just when I seem to be coming out of school,—­very sorry to have been such a foolish boy, yet having taken a prize or two, and expecting now to enter upon some more serious business than cricket,—­I am dismissed by the Master I hoped to serve, with a—­’That’s all I want of you, sir.’”

In such times he found relief by reverting to the past.  He wrote in the beginning of February a paper for the University Magazine on “My First Editor,” W.H.  Harrison, and forgot himself—­almost—­in bright reminiscences of youthful days and early associations.  Next, as Mr. Marcus Huish, who had shown great friendliness and generosity in providing prints for the Sheffield museum, was now proposing to hold an Exhibition of Mr. Ruskin’s “Turners” at the Fine Art Galleries in New Bond Street, it was necessary to arrange the exhibits and to prepare the catalogue.  For the next fortnight he struggled on with this labour, and with his last “Fors”—­the last he was to write in the long series of more than seven years.[40] How little the thousands who read the preface to his catalogue, with its sad sketch of Turner’s fate, and what they supposed to be its “customary burst of terminal eloquence,” understood that it was indeed the cry of one who had been wounded in the house of his friends, and was now believing every day that dawned on him to be his last.  He told of Turner’s youthful picture of the Coniston Fells and its invocation to the mists of morning, bidding them “in honour to the world’s great Author, rise,”—­and then how Turner’s “health, and with it in great degree his mind, failed suddenly with a snap of some vital chord,” after the sunset splendours of his last, dazzling efforts....

[Footnote 40:  “Fors” was taken up again, at intervals, later on; but never with the same purpose and continuity.]

“Morning breaks, as I write, along those Coniston Fells, and the level mists, motionless and grey beneath the rose of the moorlands, veil the lower woods, and the sleeping village, and the long lawns by the lake-shore.  Oh that some one had but told me, in my youth, when all my heart seemed to be set on these colours and clouds, that appear for a little while and then vanish away, how little my love of them would serve me, when the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of morning should be completed; and all my thoughts should be of those whom, by neither, I was to meet more!”

The catalogue was finished, and hurried off to the printers.  A week of agitating suspense at home, and then it could no longer be concealed.  Friends and foes alike were startled and saddened with the news of his “sudden and dangerous illness,”—­some form of inflammation of the brain—­the result of overwork, but still more immediately of the emotional strain from which he had been suffering.