John Ruskin first met Charles Eliot Norton in 1855. Norton was the American counterpart of a man of letters. With a common distaste for the industrial and scientific directions of modern civilisation, the two men became intimate correspondents and the letters they exchanged until shortly before Ruskin's death in 1900 reflect and express, often more vividly than his own public prose, the spiritual, amatory, artistic, and cultural preoccupations of...