Allen, Professor Ruskin
continued his studies of Alpine flowers for "Proserpina." In the autumn
he gave a lecture at Kendal (Oct. 1st, repeated at Eton College Dec.
8th) on "Yewdale and its Streamlets."

"Yewdale"--reprinted as Part V. of "Deucalion"--took an unusual
importance in his own mind, not only because it was a great success as a
lecture--though some Kendalians complained that there was not enough
"information" in it:--but because it was the first given since that
Christmas at Venice, when a new insight had been granted him, as he
felt, into spiritual things, and a new burden laid on him, to withstand
the rash conclusions of "science falsely so called," and to preach in
their place the presence of God in nature and in man.

Writing to Miss Beever about his Oxford course of that autumn, "Readings
in Modern Painters," [38] he said, on the 2nd December:

[Footnote 38: Nov. 6, 8, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29 and Dec. 1,
1877. These lectures were never prepared for publication as a course;
the last lecture was printed in the _Nineteenth Century_ for January,
1878.]

"I gave yesterday the twelfth and last of my course of lectures this
term, to a room crowded by six hundred people, two-thirds members of the
University, and with its door wedged open by those who could not get in;
this interest of theirs being granted to me, I doubt not, because for
the first time in Oxford I have been able to speak to them boldly of
immortal life. I intended when I began the course only to have read
'Modern Painters' to them; but when I began, some of your favourite
bits[39] interested the men so much, and brought so much larger a
proportion of undergraduates than usual, that I took pains to re-inforce
and press them home; and people say I have never given so useful a
course yet. But it has taken all my time and strength."

[Footnote 39: Miss Beever had published early in 1875 the extracts from
"Modern Painters," so widely known as "Frondes Agrestes."]

He wrote again, on Dec. 16th, from Herne Hill:

"It is a long while since I've felt so good-for-nothing as I do
this morning. My very wristbands curl up in a dog's-eared and
disconsolate manner; my little room is all a heap of disorder. I've
got a hoarseness and wheezing and sneezing and coughing and
choking. I can't speak and I can't think; I'm miserable in bed and
useless out of it; and it seems to me as if I could never venture
to op