days, and
Fridays are come."

Dr. Andrews was no doubt a genial teacher, and had been a scholar of
some distinction in his University of Glasgow; but Mrs. Ruskin thought
him "flighty," as well she might, when, after six months' Greek, he
proposed (in March, 1831) to begin Hebrew with John. It was a great
misfortune for the young genius that he was not more sternly drilled at
the outset, and he suffered for it through many a long year of
struggles with deficient scholarship.

The Doctor had a large family and pretty daughters. One, who wrote
verses in John's note-book, and sang "Tambourgi," Mrs. Orme, lived until
1892 in Bedford Park; the other lives in Coventry Patmore's "Angel in
the House." When Ruskin, thirty years later, wrote of that
doubtfully-received poem, that it was the "sweetest analysis we possess
of quiet, modern, domestic feeling," few of his readers could have known
all the grounds of his appreciation, or suspected the weight of meaning
in the words.

CHAPTER IV

MOUNTAIN-WORSHIP (1830-1835)

Critics who are least disposed to give Ruskin credit for his artistic
doctrines or economical theories unite in allowing that he taught his
generation to look at Nature, and especially at the sublime in
Nature--at storms and sunrises, and the forests and snows of the Alps.
This mission of mountain-worship was the outcome of a passion beside
which the other interests and occupations of his youth were only toys.
He could take up his mineralogy and his moralizing and lay them down,
but the love of mountain scenery was something beyond his control. We
have seen him leave his heart in the Highlands at three years old; we
have now to follow his passionate pilgrimages to Skiddaw and Snowdon, to
the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc.

They had planned a great tour through the Lakes and the North two years
before, but were stopped at Plymouth by the news of Mrs. Richardson's
death. At last the plan was carried out. A prose diary was written
alternately by John and Mary, one carrying it on when the other tired,
with rather curious effect of unequally-yoked collaboration. We read how
they "set off from London at seven o'clock on Tuesday morning, the 18th
May," and thenceforward we are spared no detail: the furniture of the
inns; the bills of fare; when they got out of the carriage and walked;
how they lost their luggage; what they thought of colleges and chapels,
music and May races at Oxford, of Shakespeare's tomb, and t