With seven months at his own disposal, he did a vast amount of work, especially in drawing.  The studies of mountain-form and Italian design, in the year before, had given him a greater interest in the “Liber Studiorum,” Turner’s early book of Essays in Composition.  He found there that use of the pure line, about which he has since said so much, together with a thoughtfully devised scheme of light-and-shade in mezzotint, devoted to the treatment of landscape in the same spirit as that in which the Italian masters treated figure-subjects in their pen-and-bistre studies.  And just as he had imitated the Rogers vignettes in his boyhood, now in his youth he tried to emulate the fine abstract flow and searching expressiveness of the etched line, and the studied breadth of shade, by using the quill-pen with washes.  At first he kept pretty closely to monochrome.  His object was form, and his special talent was for draughtsmanship rather than for colour.  But it was this winter’s study of the “Liber Studiorum” that started him on his own characteristic course; and while we have no pen-and-wash work of his before 1845 (except a few experiments after Prout), we find him now using the pen continually during the “Modern Painters” period.

On reaching the Lake of Geneva he wrote, or sketched, one of his best-known pieces of verse, “Mont Blanc Revisited,” and a few other poems followed, the last of the long series which had once been his chief interest and aim in life.  With this lonely journey there came new and deeper feelings; with his increased literary power, fresh resources of diction; and he was never so near being a poet as when he gave up writing verse.  Too condensed to be easily understood, too solemn in their movement to be trippingly read, the lines on “The Arve at Cluse,” on “Mont Blanc,” and “The Glacier,” should not be passed over as merely rhetorical.  And the reflections on the loungers at Conflans ("Why Stand ye here all the Day Idle?”) are full of the spirit in which he was gradually approaching the great problems of his life, to pass through art into the earnest study of human conduct and its final cause.

He was still deeply religious—­more deeply so than before, and found the echo of his own thoughts in George Herbert, with whom he “communed in spirit” while he travelled through the Alps.  But the forms of outward religion were losing their hold over him in proportion as his inward religion became more real and intense.  It was only a few days after writing these lines that he “broke the Sabbath” for the first time in his life, by climbing a hill after church.  That was the first shot fired in a war, in one of the strangest and saddest wars between conscience and reason that biography records; strange because the opposing forces were so nearly matched, and sad because the struggle lasted until their field of battle was desolated before either won a victory.