Coniston Fells and
its invocation to the mists of morning, bidding them "in honour to the
world's great Author, rise,"--and then how Turner's "health, and with it
in great degree his mind, failed suddenly with a snap of some vital
chord," after the sunset splendours of his last, dazzling efforts....

[Footnote 40: "Fors" was taken up again, at intervals, later on; but
never with the same purpose and continuity.]

"Morning breaks, as I write, along those Coniston Fells, and the level
mists, motionless and grey beneath the rose of the moorlands, veil the
lower woods, and the sleeping village, and the long lawns by the
lake-shore. Oh that some one had but told me, in my youth, when all my
heart seemed to be set on these colours and clouds, that appear for a
little while and then vanish away, how little my love of them would
serve me, when the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of morning
should be completed; and all my thoughts should be of those whom, by
neither, I was to meet more!"

The catalogue was finished, and hurried off to the printers. A week of
agitating suspense at home, and then it could no longer be concealed.
Friends and foes alike were startled and saddened with the news of his
"sudden and dangerous illness,"--some form of inflammation of the
brain--the result of overwork, but still more immediately of the
emotional strain from which he had been suffering.

On March 4th, the Turner Exhibition opened, and day by day the bulletins
from Brantwood announcing his condition were read by multitudes of
visitors with eager and sorrowful interest. Newspapers all the world
over copied the daily reports: in the Far West of America the same
telegrams were posted, and they say even a more demonstrative sympathy
was shown. Nor was the feeling confined to the English speaking public.
The Oxford Proctor in Convocation of April 24th, when the patient, after
the first burst of the storm was slowly drifting back into calmer
waters, thought it worth while, in the course of his speech, to mention
that in Italy, where he had lately been on an Easter vacation tour, he
had witnessed a widespread anxiety about Ruskin, and prayers put up for
his recovery.

By May 10th he was so much better that he could complete the catalogue
with some gossip about those Alpine drawings of 1842 which he regarded
as the climax of Turner's work. The first--and best in some ways--of the
series was the Spluegen. Without any word to him, the dilig