stones around them except the prison walls of their seclusion; he could
not be within constant sight of the mountains without thinking over the
wonders of their scenery and structure. And it was well for him that it
could be so. The terrible depression of mind which his social and
philanthropic work had brought on, found a relief in the renewal of his
old mountain-worship. After sending off the last of his _Fraser_ papers,
in which, when the verdict had twice gone against him, he tried to show
cause why sentence should not be passed, the strain was at its severest.
He felt, as few others not directly interested felt, the sufferings of
the outcast in English slums and Savoyard hovels; and heard the cry of
the oppressed in Poland and in Italy: and he had been silenced. What
could he do but, as he said in the letters to Norton, "lay his head to
the very ground," and try to forget it all among the stones and the
snows?

He wandered about geologizing, and spent a while at Talloires on the
Lake of Annecy, where the old Abbey had been turned into an inn, and one
slept in a monk's cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery,
St. Bernard of Menthon's memory haunting the place, and St. Germain's
cave close by in the rocks above. At the end of May he came back to
England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Institution. The
subject he chose was "The Stratified Alps of Savoy."

At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the
Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in
papers embedded in Transactions of various societies. Professor Alphonse
Favre's great work did not appear until 1867, and the "Mechanismus der
Gebirgsbildung" of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English
public the subject was a fresh one. To Ruskin it was familiar: he had
been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of
twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly
thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the
intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer
and note-book. In the field he had compared Studer's meagre sections,
and consulted the available authorities on physical geology, though he
had never entered upon the more popular sister-science of palaeontology.
He left the determination of strata to specialists: his interest was
fixed on the structure of mountains--the relation of geology t