in
this first visit to England in 1850 and those belonging to another a
little later, but my impression is very strong that it was during the
former that I spent the evening at the Grosvenor Street residence, at
which I met several artists of Ruskin's intimacy, and amongst them
G.F. Watts. I then saw Mrs. Ruskin, and I have a very vivid impression
of her personal beauty. I remember saying to a friend, to whom I spoke
of the visit just after, that she was the most beautiful woman I
had seen in England. As I approached the house there was a bagpiper
playing near it, and the pipes entered into the conversation in the
drawing-room. On my making some very disparaging opinion of their
music, which I heard for the first time, Mrs. Ruskin flamed up with
indignation, but, after an annihilating look, she said mildly, "I
suppose no Southerner can understand the pipes," and we discussed them
calmly, she telling some stories to illustrate their power and the
special range of their effect.

At that time Ruskin held very strong Calvinistic notions, and as I
kept my Puritanism unshaken we had as many conversations on religion
as on art, the two being then to me almost identical and to him
closely related. I remember his saying once, in speaking of the
doctrine of foreordination (to me a dreadful bugbear), as I was
drinking a glass of sherry, that he "believed that it had been
ordained from all eternity whether I should set that glass down empty
or without finishing the wine." This was to me the most perplexing
problem of all that Ruskin put before me, for it was the first time
that the doctrine of Calvin had come before me in a concrete form.
Another incident gave me a serious perplexity as to the accuracy of
Ruskin's perceptions of nature. Leslie had given me a card to see Mr.
Holford's collection of pictures, in which was one of Turner's, the
balcony scene in Venice, called, I think, "Juliet and her Nurse." It
was a moonlight, with the most wonderful rendering of a certain effect
seen with the moon at the spectator's back, and I noted in speaking to
Ruskin, later on, that no other picture I had ever seen of moonlight
had succeeded so fully in realizing it, to which he replied that he
had never noticed that it was a moonlight picture; but when I called
his attention to the display of fireworks on the Grand Canal, he
admitted that it was not customary to let off fireworks by day, and
that it must be a night scene.

My acquaintance w