“It takes a great deal, when I am at Geneva, to make me wish myself anywhere else, and, of all places else, in London; nevertheless, I very heartily wish at this moment that I were looking out on the Norwood Hills, and were expecting you and the children to breakfast to-morrow.

“I had very serious thoughts, when I received your note, of running home; but I expected that very day an American friend, Mr. Stillman, who, I thought, would miss me more here than you in London, so I stayed.

“What a dreadful thing it is that people should have to go to America again, after coming to Europe!  It seems to me an inversion of the order of nature.  I think America is a sort of ‘United’ States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ungrammatical), particularly when they have been making themselves cruelly pleasant to friends here.  My friend Norton, whom I met first on this very blue lake water, had no business to go back to Boston again, any more than you....

“So you have been seeing the Pope and all his Easter performances!  I congratulate you, for I suppose it is something like ’Positively the last appearance on any stage.’  What was the use of thinking about him?  You should have had your own thoughts about what was to come after him.  I don’t mean that Roman Catholicism will die out so quickly.  It will last pretty nearly as long as Protestantism, which keeps it up; but I wonder what is to come next.  That is the main question just now for everybody.”

W.J.  Stillman had been a correspondent about 1851,—­“involved in mystical speculations, partly growing out of the second volume of ‘Modern Painters,’” as he said of himself in an article on “John Ruskin” in the Century Magazine (January, 1888).  With him Ruskin spent July and August of 1860 at Chamouni.  He did but little drawing, and in the few sketches that remain of that summer there is evidence that his mind was far away from its old love of mountains and of streamlets.  His lonely walks in the pinewoods of the Arveron were given to meditation on a great problem which had been set, as it seemed, for him to solve, ever since he had written that chapter on “The Nature of Gothic.”  Now at last, in the solitude of the Alps, he could grapple with the questions he had raised; and the outcome of the struggle was “Unto this Last.”

The year before, from Thun and Bonneville and Lausanne (August and September, 1859) he had written letters to E.S.  Dallas, suggested by the strikes in the London building trade.  In these he appears to have sketched the outline of a new conception of social science, which he was now elaborating with more attempt at system and brevity than he had been accustomed to use.