This “Harlech Castle” transaction, however, was not altogether unlucky.  It brought him an introduction to the painter, whom he met when he was next in town, at Mr. Griffith’s house.  He knew well enough the popular idea of Turner as a morose and niggardly, inexplicable man.  As he had seen faults in Turner’s painting, so he was ready to acknowledge the faults in his character.  But while the rest of the world, with a very few exceptions, dwelt upon the faults, Ruskin had penetration to discern the virtues which they hid.  Few passages in his autobiography are more striking than the transcript from his journal of the same evening, recording his first impression: 

“’I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded—­gentleman; good-natured evidently, bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of the mind not brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look.’  Pretty close that,” he adds later, “and full, to be set down at the first glimpse, and set down the same evening.”

Turner was not a man to make an intimate of, all at once; the acquaintanceship continued, and it ripened into as close a confidence as the eccentric painter’s habits of life permitted.  He seems to have been more at home with the father than with the son; but even when the young man took to writing books about him, he did not, as Carlyle is reported to have done in a parallel case, show his exponent to the door.

The occasion of John Ruskin’s coming to town this time was not a pleasant one—­nothing less than the complete breakdown of his health.  It is true that he was working very hard during this spring; but hard reading does not of itself kill people, only when it is combined with real and prolonged mental distress, acting upon a sensitive temperament.  The case was thought serious; reading was stopped, and the patient was ordered abroad for the winter.

For that summer there was no hurry to be gone; rest was more needed than change, at first.  Late in September the same family-party crossed the sea to Calais.  How different a voyage for them all from the merry departures of bygone Maytides!  Which way should they turn?  Not to Paris, for there was the cause of all these ills; so they went straight southwards, through Normandy to the Loire, and saw the chateaux and churches from Orleans to Tours, famous for their Renaissance architecture and for the romance of their chivalric history.  Amboise especially made a strong impression upon the languid and unwilling invalid.  It stirred him up to write, in easy verse, the tale of love and death that his own situation too readily suggested.  In “The Broken Chain” he indulged his gloomy fancy, turning, as it was sure to do, into a morbid nightmare of mysterious horror, not without reminiscence of Coleridge’s “Christabel.”  But through it all he preserved, so to speak, his dramatic incognito; his own disappointment and his own anticipated death were the motives of the tale, but treated in such a manner as not to betray his secret, nor even to wound the feelings of the lady who now was beyond appeal from an honourable lover—­taking his punishment like a man.