issance
architecture and for the romance of their chivalric history. Amboise
especially made a strong impression upon the languid and unwilling
invalid. It stirred him up to write, in easy verse, the tale of love and
death that his own situation too readily suggested. In "The Broken
Chain" he indulged his gloomy fancy, turning, as it was sure to do, into
a morbid nightmare of mysterious horror, not without reminiscence of
Coleridge's "Christabel." But through it all he preserved, so to speak,
his dramatic incognito; his own disappointment and his own anticipated
death were the motives of the tale, but treated in such a manner as not
to betray his secret, nor even to wound the feelings of the lady who now
was beyond appeal from an honourable lover--taking his punishment like a
man.

This poem lasted him, for private writing, all through that journey--a
fit emblem of the broken life which it records. A healthier source of
distraction was his drawing, in which he had received a fresh impetus
from the exhibition of David Roberts' sketches in the East. More
delicate than Prout's work, entering into the detail of architectural
form more thoroughly, and yet suggesting chiaroscuro with broad washes
of quiet tone and touches of light, cleverly introduced--"that
marvellous _pop_ of light across the foreground," Harding said of the
picture of the Great Pyramid--these drawings were a mean between the
limited manner of Prout and the inimitable fulness of Turner Ruskin took
up the fine pencil and the broad brush, and, with that blessed habit of
industry which has helped so many a one through times of trial, made
sketch after sketch on the half-imperial board, finished just so far as
his strength and time allowed, as they passed from the Loire to the
mountains of Auvergne; and to the valley of the Rhone, and thence
slowly round the Riviera to Pisa and Florence and Rome.

He was not in a mood to sympathize readily with the enthusiasms of other
people. They expected him to be delighted with the scenery, the
buildings, the picture-galleries of Italy, and to forget himself in
admiration. He did admire Michelangelo; and he was interested in the
back-streets and slums of the cities. Something piquant was needed to
arouse him; the mild ecstasies of common connoisseurship hardly appeal
to a young man between life and death. He met the friends to whom he had
brought introductions--Mr. Joseph Severn, who had been Keats' companion,
and was aft