To his Father

Venice, 9th January, 1852.

You say you are sick of the folly of mankind. I have been so a long time—but the great mystery to me is that so much misery is mere folly; that so much grievous harm is done in mere ignorance and stupidity, evermore to be regretted as much as the consequence of actual crime. You say Turner kept his treasures to rot, not knowing or understanding the good it would be to give me some. Yes, but in the same way, I myself, through sheer ignorance of the mighty power of those Swiss drawings, suffered the opportunity of his chief energy to pass by, and only got the two—St. Gothard and Goldau. Had I had the least idea at the time of the real power of those sketches, I should have gone down on my knees to you night after night, till I had prevailed on you to let me have all that Turner would do. But I knew it not; I thought them beautiful, but sketchy and imperfect compared with his former works. This was not my fault. It was the necessary condition of my mind in its progress to perfect judgment, yet it had this irrevocably fatal effect—leaving in my heart through my whole life the feeling of irremediable loss, such as would, if I were not to turn my thoughts away from it, become in my “memory a rooted sorrow.”