=His Pebble Studies.=—“Had there been anybody then to teach me anything about plants or pebbles,” he says, “it had been good for me.” He loved the pebbles of the Tay, and followed up his acquaintance with pebbles at Matlock. “In the glittering white broken spar, speckled with galena, by which the walks of the hotel garden were made bright, and in the slopes of the pretty village, and in many a happy walk along its cliffs, I pursued my mineralogical studies on fluor, calcite, and the ores of lead, and with indescribable rapture when I was allowed to go into a cave.” =A Life-shaping Intimacy.=—Later we find him going up Snowdon, “of which ascent I remember, as the most exciting event, the finding for the first time in my life a real ‘mineral’ for myself, a piece of copper pyrites!” This eagerly sought acquaintance with pebbles resulted in the life-shaping intimacy with minerals to which we owe _The Ethics of the Dust_. =Insatiate Delight in a Book—Ruskin’s.=—As for _Books_, we are told how Ruskin grew up upon the Waverley Novels, on Pope’s Homer’s _Iliad_, many of Shakespeare’s plays, and much else that is delightful; but he does not give us an instance of the sort of thing we are looking for—the sudden keen, insatiate delight in a book which means kinship—until he is introduced to Byron. His first acquaintance with Byron he puts “about the beginning of the teen period”:— “But very certainly, by the end of this year 1834, I knew my Byron pretty well all through, all but Cain, Werner, the Deformed Transformed, and Vision of Judgment, none of which I could understand, nor did papa and mamma think it would be well I should try to.... So far as I could understand it, I rejoiced in all the sarcasm of Don Juan. But my firm decision, as soon as I got well into the later cantos of it, that Byron was to be my master in verse, as Turner in colour, was made of course in that gosling (or say cygnet) epoch of existence, without consciousness of the deeper instincts that prompted it: only two things I consciously recognised, that his truth of observation was the most exact, and his chosen expression the most concentrated, that I had yet found in literature.... But the thing wholly new and precious to me in Byron was his measured and living _truth_—measured, as compared with Homer; and living, as compared with everybody else.... He taught me the meaning of Chillon and of Meillerie, and bade me seek first in Venice—the ruined homes of Foscari and Falieri.... Byron told me of, and reanimated for me, the real people whose feet had worn the marble I trod on.” =Wordsworth’s.=—This is how Wordsworth took to his books:—