John Ruskin’s lifeline had marked nodes, the chief of which may be characterized as follows. Up to the early forties he had lived and written under the dominant influence of his father, who held very conservative views of religion; but the foundations of the son’s faith were shaken and the tenet “which had held the hopes and beliefs of his youth and early manhood had proved too narrow. He was stretching forth to a wider and, as he felt, a nobler conception of life and destiny, but the transition was through much travail of soul.”[20] He wrote, “It is a difficult thing to live without hope of another world when one has been used to it for forty years. But by how much the more difficult, by so much it makes one braver and stronger.” And again, “It may be much nobler to hope for the advance of the human race only than for one’s own immortality, much less selfish to look upon oneself merely as a leaf on a tree than as an independent spirit, but it is much less pleasant.” Cook says that “he had been brought up as a Bible Christian in the strictest school of literal interpretation but he had also become deeply versed in some branches of natural science, and the truths of science seemed inconsistent with a literal belief in the Scriptures.” He had been much influenced by Spurgeon, whom he knew well in private life, but made no secret of his adhesion to Colenso’s heresies. No one understood the inmost causes of his muse as he grew melancholic. He was exhausted, dyspeptic, wanted to reconstruct society, had “the soul of a prophet consumed with wrath against a wayward and perverse generation,” but also the heart of a lover of his fellowmen filled with pity for the miseries and follies of mankind. His mother recognized his tendency to misanthropy, and only at forty-two did he break away from parental discipline. “A new epoch of life began for me in this wise, that my father and mother could travel with me no more, but Rose [La Touche, the young girl with whom he was in love and who died when he was in the early fifties and left him forlorn] in heart was with me always, and all I did was for her sake.” This was his first “exile.” The clouds that had more than once lowered over his life settled in old age and he died in 1900 at the age of eighty-one. During most of the last ten years he presented one of the saddest of all the spectacles of old age, “dying from the top downward.” He was apathetic, monosyllabic, could write little, and spoke less; and but for the kindly ministrations of Mrs. Severn and the thoughtfulness of Kate Greenaway almost nothing either in Brantwood or the great world without retained interest for him.