Later on we have to tell how he dwelt in Doubting Castle, and how he escaped.  But the pilgrim had not yet met Giant Despair; and his progress was very pleasant in that spring of 1845, the year of fine weather, as he drove round the Riviera, and the cities of Tuscany opened out their treasures to him.  There was Lucca, with San Frediano and the glories of Romanesque architecture; Fra Bartolommeo’s picture of the Madonna with the Magdalen and St. Catherine of Siena, his initiation into the significance of early religious painting:  and, taking hold of his imagination, in her marble sleep, more powerfully than any flesh and blood, the dead lady of St. Martin’s Church, Ilaria di Caretto.  There was Pisa, with the Campo Santo and the jewel shrine of Sta.  Maria della Spina, then undestroyed; the excitement of street sketching among a sympathetic crowd of fraternizing Italians; the Abbe Rosini, Professor of Fine Arts, whom he made friends with, endured as lecturer, and persuaded into scaffold-building in the Campo Santo for study of the frescoes.  And there was Florence, with Giotto’s campanile and Santa Maria Novella, where the young Protestant frequented monasteries, made hay with monks, sketched with his new-found friends Rudolf Durheim of Berne and Dieudonne the French purist; and spent long days copying Angelico and annotating Ghirlandajo, fevered with the sun of Italy at its strongest, and with the rapture of discovery, “which turns the unaccustomed head like Chianti wine.”

Coutet got him away, at last, to the Alps; worn out and in despondent reaction after all this excitement.  He spent a month at Macugnaga, reading Shakespeare and trying to draw boulders; drifting gradually back into strength enough to attack the next piece of work, the study of Turner sites on the St. Gothard, where he made the drawings afterwards engraved in “Modern Painters.”  In August, J.D.  Harding was going to Venice, and arranged for a meeting at Baveno, on the Lago Maggiore.  Gossip had credited him with a share in “Modern Painters”; now the tables were turned, and Griffith, the picture-dealer, wanted to know if it was true that John Ruskin had helped Harding with his new book, just out.  They sketched together, Ruskin perhaps emulating his friend’s slap-dash style in the “Sunset” reproduced in his “Poems,” and illustrating his own in the “Water-mill.”  And so they drove together to Verona and thence to Venice.

At Venice they stayed in Danieli’s Hotel, on the Riva dei Schiavoni, and began by studying picturesque canal-life.  Mr. Boxall, R.A., and Mrs. Jameson, the historian of Sacred and Legendary Art, were their companions.  Another old friend, Joseph Severn, had in 1843 gained one of the prizes at the Westminster Hall Cartoons Competition; and a letter from Ruskin, referring to the work there, shows how he still pondered on the subject that had been haunting him in the Alps: