For eight years, 1866–74, Ruskin had lived under stress of deep emotion. There had been moments, days, and even months of hope; but these only served to intensify the preponderating disappointment and pain. “I wonder mightily,” he wrote in his autobiography, “what sort of creature I should have turned out, if instead of the distracting and useless pain, I had had the joy of approved love, and the untellable, incalculable motive of its sympathy and praise. It seems to me such things are not allowed in this world. The men capable of the highest imaginative passion are always tossed on fiery waves by it.” On those fiery waves he himself had long been tossed. “The woman I hoped would have been my wife,” he wrote at the end of 1874, “is dying.” In May 1875 the end came. Before relating the closing incidents, I must resume from earlier chapters, and recount in somewhat greater detail, the stages in this tragic romance.

When Ruskin declared his love for Miss Rose La Touclie, and she had accepted it on a term of probation, her parents had been painfully surprised. Ruskin was of an age rather with the mother than with the daughter; he had indeed taken a friendly interest in the education of the child; but the mother had supposed that it was by her society in equal measure that Ruskin was attracted.