I might trace the consummation of various other affinities in these two illustrious subjects, but space fails; I can only indicate the joy of pursuing the acquaintanceship, followed by the endless occupation for mind and heart, in that high intimacy which we call the _Vocation_ of each of these men of genius. =Turner’s Call to Ruskin.=—Ruskin’s ‘career,’ to use our own common and expressive figure, began when,— “On my thirteenth (?) birthday, 8th February 1832, my father’s partner, Mr Henry Telford, gave me Rogers’s Italy, and determined the main tenor of my life.... I had no sooner cast my eyes on the Turner vignettes than I took them for my only masters, and set myself to imitate them as far as I possibly could by fine pen shading.... “My father at last gave me, not for a beginning of a Turner collection, but for a specimen of Turner’s work, which was all—as it was supposed—I should ever need or aspire to possess, the ‘Richmond Bridge, Surrey.’” Again, anent his purchase of Turner’s ‘Harlech’:— “Whatever germs of better things remained in me, were then all centred in this love of Turner. It was not a piece of painted paper, but a Welsh castle and village, and Snowdon in blue cloud, that I bought for my seventy pounds.” =Sincere Work.=—Not until he is twenty-two does he produce what he considers his first sincere drawing:— “One day on the road to Norwood, I noticed a bit of ivy round a thorn stem, which seemed, even to my critical judgment, not ‘ill-composed,’ and proceeded to make a light and shade pencil study of it in my grey paper pocket-book, carefully, as if it had been a bit of sculpture, liking it more and more as I drew. When it was done, I saw that I had virtually lost all my time since I was twelve years old, because no one had ever told me to draw what was really there!” =Initiation.=—Later, follows the story of his true initiation:— “I took out my book and began to draw a little aspen tree, on the other side of the cart-road, carefully.... Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the langour passed away, the beautiful lines insisted on being traced, without weariness. More and more beautiful they became as each rose out of the rest and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they composed themselves by finer laws than any known of men. At last the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees nowhere.... ‘He hath made everything beautiful in His time’ became for me thenceforward the interpretation of the bond between the human mind and all visible things.”