Footnote 22, Chapter 5, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. Diaries, I, 364. More grotesque imagery yet abounds in certain letters Ruskin wrote Effie during their courtship. For example: "You are like a sweet forest of pleasant glades and whispering branches‹where people wander on and on in its playing shadows they know not how far -- and when they come near the centre of it, it is all cold and impenetrable -- and when they would fain turn, lo -- they are hedged with briers and thorns and cannot escape, but all torn and bleeding -- " (Admiral Sir William James, John Ruskin and Effie Gray [New York: Scribner's, 1947], 68).
Last modified December 2000