At Fontainebleau soon after, in much the same circumstances, a study of an aspen-tree, idly begun, but carried out with interest and patience, confirmed the principle.  At Geneva, once more in the church where he had formed such resolutions the year before, the desire came over him with renewed force; now not only to be definitely employed, but to be employed in the service of a definite mission, which was, in art, exactly what Carlyle had preached in every other sphere of life in that book of “Heroes”:  the gospel of sincerity.

The design took shape.  At Chamouni he studied plants and rocks and clouds, not as an artist to make pictures out of them, nor as a scientist to class them and analyze them; but to learn their aspects and enter into the spirit of their growth and structure.  And though on his way home through Switzerland and down the Rhine he made a few drawings in his old style for admiring friends, they were the last of the kind that he attempted.  Thenceforward his path was marked out; he had found a new vocation.  He was not to be a poet—­that was too definitely bound up with the past which he wanted to forget, and with conventionalities which he wished to shake off; not to be an artist, strugging with the rest to please a public which he felt himself called upon to teach; not a man of science, for his botany and geology were to be the means, and not the ends, of his teaching; but the mission was laid upon him to tell the world that Art, no less than other spheres of life, had its Heroes; that the mainspring of their energy was Sincerity, and the burden of their utterance, Truth.

BOOK II

THE ART CRITIC

(1842-1860)

CHAPTER I

“TURNER AND THE ANCIENTS” (1842-1844)

The neighbour, or the Oxonian friend, who climbed the steps of the Herne Hill house and called upon Mrs. Ruskin, in the autumn and winter of 1842, would learn that Mr. John was hard at work in his own study overhead.  Those were its windows, on the second-floor, looking out upon the front-garden; the big dormer-window above was his bedroom, from which he had his grand view of lowland, and far horizon, and unconfined sky, comparatively clear of London smoke.  In the study itself, screened from the road by russet foliage and thick evergreens, great things were going on.  But Mr. John could be interrupted, would come running lightly downstairs, with both hands out to greet the visitor; would show the pictures, eagerly demonstrating the beauties of the last new Turners, “Ehrenbreitstein” and “Lucerne,” just acquired, and anticipating the sunset glories and mountain gloom of the “Goldau” and “Dazio Grande,” which the great artist was “realizing” for him from sketches he had chosen at Queen Anne Street.  He was very busy—­but never too busy to see his friends—­writing a book.  And, the visitor gone, he would run up to his room and his writing.