Letter from John Ruskin, Oxford, to Charles Somers Cocks, 1847 June 24 : autograph manuscript signed.

Declining to join Cocks in Italy and describing the 1847 British Association meeting at Oxford. Ruskin is grieved at Cocks' account of his health and feelings, more so because he is not able to join him. He knows the feeling of loneliness in Italy but is himself weak and nervous and is going again to Leamington [the spa town] for a week or two, and [the physician Henry] Jephson may wish him to stay longer. Afterwards, he will remain quiet in Scotland. Ruskin imagines that he is as unwell as Cocks and so would be a dull and perhaps encumbering companion. Trusts that when Cocks gets to the higher Alps he will get quit of the gloom which now depresses him, and which, in Ruskin's experience, seems to result less from mere solitude than from the horror of ruin and ghostly, shadowy, vicious, hopeless, heartless aspect of Italian cities. When Cocks gets among the good, honest Switzers, new built chalets, new mown hay, new made cheese, and new fallen snow he will be new made himself. Ruskin is in the thick of the British Association meeting, keeping himself as quiet as he can, and marvelously useless. [Edward Bouverie] Pusey's house is full of French. Sir T[homas Dyke] Acland is in Peckwater [Quadrangle]. It would have done Cocks' heart good to see him rushing upstairs with R[obert] Inglis [who chaired the General Meeting] shouting at the top of his voice, shaking the stones. [The astronomer Urbain] Leverrier and [the astronomer John Couch] Adams were sitting side by side at the general meeting. Everyone is there, and there is more heat and less humbug than he thought. Poor Henry Acland [physician and college friend of Ruskin's] had half the correspondence to do.