is old friend Rawdon Brown[17], and Count
Giberto Borromeo, whom he visited at Milan on his way home, with deep
interest in the Luinis and in the authentic bust of St. Carlo; so
closely resembling Ruskin himself. Another noteworthy encounter is
recorded in a letter of May 4th.[18]

[Footnote 17: Whose book on the English in Italy (from Venetian
documents) was shortly to be published, with funds supplied by Ruskin.]

[Footnote 18: This date ought to be "June 4th," as Mr. E.T. Cook notices
(Library Edn. XIX., p. liv.).]

"As I was drawing in the square this morning, in a lovely, quiet,
Italian, light, there came up the poet Longfellow with his little
daughter--a girl of 12, or 13, with _springy_-curled flaxen
hair,--curls, or waves, that wouldn't come out in damp, I mean. They
stayed talking beside me some time. I don't think it was a very vain
thought that came over me, that if a photograph could have been taken of
the beautiful square of Verona, in that soft light, with Longfellow and
his daughter talking to me at my work--some people both in England and
America would have liked copies of it."

Readers of "Fors" will recognise an incident noted on the 18th of June.

"Yesterday, it being quite cool, I went for a walk; and as I came down
from a rather quiet hillside, a mile or two out of town, I past a house
where the women were at work spinning the silk off the cocoons. There
was a sort of whirring sound as in an English mill; but at intervals
they sang a long sweet chant, all together, lasting about two
minutes--then pausing a minute and then beginning again. It was good and
tender music, and the multitude of voices prevented any sense of
failure, so that it was very lovely and sweet, and like the things that
I mean to try to bring to pass."

For he was already meditating on the thoughts that issued in the
proposals of St. George's Guild, and the daily letters of this summer
are full of allusions to a scheme for a great social movement, as well
as to his plans for the control of Alpine torrents and the better
irrigation of their valleys. On the 2nd of June he wrote:--"I see more
and more clearly every day my power of showing how the Alpine torrents
may be--not subdued--but 'educated.' A torrent is just like a human
creature. Left to gain full strength in wantonness and rage, no power
can any more redeem it: but watch the channels of every early impulse,
and fence _them_, and your torrent becomes the gentlest and m