John Ruskin • 25 maart 1868

• John Ruskin (1819-1900) was een Britse criticus. Dagboek — en over zijn dagboek.

March 23rd, Monday, Yesterday weary, headachy, heartsick. Thos. Richmond at dinner.
Dreamed of walking in fields with my father, and coming to a narrow glacier, shut in between walls: very beautiful in soft ridges of snow. My father wondering at its narrowness and feebleness, for it wound far away between rows of trees, I explained to him that it was all that remained of the strength of the great glacier of Macugnaga which had come down fifty miles into that valley (Zermatt, I meant — not Macugnaga) . Also, a long dream of Carlyle’s coming to see me, very sorrowfully. The dream was very distinct, but the memory of it is wholly indistinct, and I had forgotten it, till I came just now by chance on Carlyle’s name in my other diary.

March 24th, Tuesday, Yesterday putting drawings in order. At Mrs. Thomson’s in evening — music wonderful; egotism — amiable, but intense.
Dreamed first of having to take care of two children in a wood walk. It was marshy, and I kept them on a hill gathering flowers, with pools of water round; I with an uneasy feeling of its being unwholesome for them. Then I was driving in a carriage with an old English gentleman who was the landlord of the shops in the street down which we drove, and he jumped up suddenly and shook his fist at a Scotch confectioner, because he had his shop open on Sunday.
I said we weren’t sure he was really selling anything; I had better go back and see. So I went, but couldn’t find anything I liked to buy. At last I found two little sponge cakes and they were a halfpenny each, and small at the price, to which I objecting, the Scotch confectioner said it was difficult to 'lay sponge cakes down’ because the 'almonds and milk’ were so dear. And then I was suddenly in a room, with my mother, writing a letter to somebody, I don’t know whom, describing some girls bathing in a pool surrounded by bulrushes [soort riet], and I was very long about it and my mother was terribly angry at my wasting time ; and I wouldn’t stop, but wrote a great deal, of which I remember only a single sentence: that ‘one of the girls when she saw her brother, jumped up and gave him such a kiss that she made the bulrushes shake, all round the pool’.