for instance, consciously meant what Ruskin found in his works.  A great painter does not paint without thought, and such thought is apt to show itself whether he will or no.  But it needs imaginative sympathy to detect and describe the thought.  And when that sympathy was given to suffering, to widespread misery, to crying wrongs; joined also with an intense passion for justice, which had already shown itself in the defence of slighted genius and neglected art; and to the Celtic temperament of some highstrung seer and trance-prophesying bard; it was no wonder that Ruskin became like one of the hermits of old, who retreated from the world to return upon it with stormy messages of awakening and flashes of truth more impressive, more illuminating than the logic of schoolmen and the state-craft of the wise.

And then he began to take up an attitude of antagonism to the world, he who had been the kindly helper and minister of delightful art.  He began to call upon those who had ears to hear to come out and be separate from the ease and hypocrisy of Vanity Fair.  Its respectabilities, its orthodoxies, he could no longer abide.  Orthodox religion, orthodox morals and politics, orthodox art and science, alike he rejected; and was rejected by each of them as a brawler, a babbler, a fanatic, a heretic.  And even when kindly Oxford gave him a quasi-academical position, it did not bring him, as it brings many a heretic, back to the fold.

In this period of storm and stress he stood alone.  The old friends of his youth were one by one passing away, if not from intercourse, still from full sympathy with him in his new mood.  His parents were no longer the guides and companions they had been; they did not understand the business he was about.  And so he was left to new associates, for he could not live without some one to love,—­that was the nature of the man, however lonely in his work and wanderings.

The new friends of this period were, at first, Americans; as the chief new friends of his latest period (the Alexanders) were American, too.  Charles Eliot Norton, after being introduced to him in London in 1855, met him again by accident on the Lake of Geneva—­the story is prettily told in “Praeterita.”  Ruskin adds: 

“Norton saw all my weaknesses, measured all my narrownesses, and, from the first, took serenely, and as it seemed of necessity, a kind of paternal authority over me, and a right of guidance....  I was entirely conscious of his rectorial power, and affectionately submissive to it, so that he might have done anything with me, but for the unhappy difference in our innate, and unchangeable, political faiths.”

So, after all, he stood alone.

Another friend about this time was Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe, to whom he wrote on June 18th, 1860, from Geneva: