d the whole fall became orange and violet
against deep shade. To-morrow I hope to get news of you all, at
Baveno."

"BAVENO, _Thursday, 6th May_, 1869.

"It is wet this morning, and very dismal, for we are in a ghastly
new Inn, the old one being shut up; and there is always a re-action
after a strong excitement like the beauty of the Simplon yesterday,
which leaves one very dull. But it is of no use growling or mewing.
I hope to be at Milan to-morrow--at Verona for Sunday. I have been
reading Dean Swift's life, and 'Gulliver's Travels' again. Putting
the delight in dirt, which is a mere disease, aside, Swift is very
like me, in most things:--in opinions exactly the same."

At Milan, next day, he went to see the St. Catherine of Luini which he
had copied, and found it wantonly damaged by the carelessness of masons
who put their ladders up against it, just as if it were a bit of common
whitewashed wall.

On the 8th he reached Verona after seventeen years' absence, and on the
10th he was in Venice. There, looking at the works of the old painters
with a fresh eye, and with feelings and thoughts far different from
those with which he had viewed them as a young man, in 1845, he saw
beauties he had passed over before, in the works of a painter till then
little regarded by connoisseurs, and entirely neglected by the public.
Historians of art like Crowe and Cavalcaselle[16] had indeed examined
Carpaccio's works and investigated his life, along with the lives and
works of many another obscure master: artists like Hook and Burne-Jones
had admired his pictures; Ruskin had mentioned his backgrounds twice or
thrice in "Stones of Venice." But no writer had noticed his
extraordinary interest as an exponent of the mythology of the Middle
Ages, as the illustrator of poetical folk-lore derived from those
antique myths of Greece, and newly presented by the genius of
Christianity.

[Footnote 16: Their "History of Painting in North Italy," containing a
detailed account of Carpaccio, was published in 1871.]

This was a discovery for which Ruskin was now ripe, He saw at once that
he had found a treasure-house of things new and old. He fell in love
with St. Ursula as, twenty-four years earlier, he had fallen in love
with the statue of Ilaria at Lucca; and she became, as time after time
he revisited Venice for her sake, a personality, a spiritual presence, a
living ideal, exactly as t