This poem lasted him, for private writing, all through that journey—­a fit emblem of the broken life which it records.  A healthier source of distraction was his drawing, in which he had received a fresh impetus from the exhibition of David Roberts’ sketches in the East.  More delicate than Prout’s work, entering into the detail of architectural form more thoroughly, and yet suggesting chiaroscuro with broad washes of quiet tone and touches of light, cleverly introduced—­“that marvellous pop of light across the foreground,” Harding said of the picture of the Great Pyramid—­these drawings were a mean between the limited manner of Prout and the inimitable fulness of Turner Ruskin took up the fine pencil and the broad brush, and, with that blessed habit of industry which has helped so many a one through times of trial, made sketch after sketch on the half-imperial board, finished just so far as his strength and time allowed, as they passed from the Loire to the mountains of Auvergne; and to the valley of the Rhone, and thence slowly round the Riviera to Pisa and Florence and Rome.

He was not in a mood to sympathize readily with the enthusiasms of other people.  They expected him to be delighted with the scenery, the buildings, the picture-galleries of Italy, and to forget himself in admiration.  He did admire Michelangelo; and he was interested in the back-streets and slums of the cities.  Something piquant was needed to arouse him; the mild ecstasies of common connoisseurship hardly appeal to a young man between life and death.  He met the friends to whom he had brought introductions—­Mr. Joseph Severn, who had been Keats’ companion, and was afterwards to be the genial Consul at Rome, and the two Messrs. Richmond, then studying art in the regular professional way; one of them to become a celebrated portrait-painter, and the father of men of mark.  But his views on art were not theirs; he was already too independent and outspoken in praise of his own heroes, and too sick in mind and body to be patient and to learn.

They had not been a month in Rome before he took the fever.  As soon as he was recovered, they went still farther South, and loitered for a couple of months in the neighbourhood of Naples, visiting the various scenes of interest—­Sorrento, Amalfi, Salerno.  The adventures of this journey are partly told in letters to Mr. Dale, and in the “Letters addressed to a College Friend.”

On the way to Naples he had noted and sketched the winter scene at La Riccia, which he afterwards used for a glowing passage in “Modern Painters”; and he had ventured into a village of brigands to draw such a castle as he had once imagined in his “Leoni.”  From Naples he wrote an account of a landslip near Giagnano, and sent it home to the Ashmolean Society.  He seemed better; they turned homewards, when suddenly he was seized with all the old symptoms worse than ever.  After another month at Rome, they travelled slowly northwards from town to town; spent ten days of May at Venice, and passed through Milan and Turin, and over the Mont Cenis to Geneva.