But the most sincere poem—­if sincerity be marked by unstudied phrase and neglected rhyme—­the most genuine “lyrical cry” of this period, is that song in which our boy-poet poured forth his longing for the “blue hills” he had loved as a baby, and for those Coniston crags over which, when he became old and sorely stricken, he was still to see the morning break.  When he wrote these verses he was nearly fourteen, or just past his birthday.  It had been eighteen months since he had been in Wales, and all the weary while he had seen no mountains; but in his regrets he goes back a year farther still, to fix upon the Lakeland hills, less majestic than Snowdon, but more endeared, and he describes his sensations on approaching the beloved objects in the very terms that Dante uses for his first sight of Beatrice: 

    “I weary for the fountain foaming,
     For shady holm and hill;
    My mind is on the mountain roaming,
     My spirit’s voice is still.

    “The crags are lone on Coniston
     And Glaramara’s dell;
    And dreary on the mighty one,
     The cloud-enwreathed Sea-fell....”

    “There is a thrill of strange delight
     That passes quivering o’er me,
    When blue hills rise upon the sight,
     Like summer clouds before me.”

Judge, then, of the delight with which he turned over the pages of a new book, given him this birthday by the kind Mr. Telford, in whose carriage he had first seen those blue hills—­a book in which all his mountain ideals, and more, were caught and kept enshrined—­visions still, and of mightier peaks and ampler valleys, romantically “tost” and sublimely “lost,” as he had so often written in his favourite rhymes.  In the vignettes to Rogers’ “Italy,” Turner had touched the chord for which John Ruskin had been feeling all these years.  No wonder that he took Turner for his leader and master, and fondly tried to copy the wonderful “Alps at Daybreak” to begin with, and then to imitate this new-found magic art with his own subjects and finally to come boldly before the world in passionate defence of a man who had done such great things for him.

This mountain-worship was not inherited from his father, who never was enthusiastic about peaks and clouds and glaciers, though he was interested in all travelling in a general way.  So that it was not Rogers’ “Italy” that sent the family off to the Alps that summer; but, fortunately for John, his father’s eye was caught by the romantic architecture of Prout’s “Sketches in Flanders and Germany,” when it came out in April, 1853, and his mother proposed to make both of them happy in a tour on the Continent.  The business-round was abandoned, but they could see Mr. Domecq on their way back through Paris, and not wholly lose the time.