As interpreted in ERMʼs listing of Contents, below, Section a agrees broadly with Collingwoodʼs section (a) of his description in the “Preliminary Note”. From August or September 1831 through no later than 10 May 1833, Ruskin started entering draft in the first blank pages following the notebookʼs front flyleaf and worked forward, apparently with little deviation from sequential order. A major project sustained throughout this first portion of the notebookʼs stratification is the epic poem, “Athens”, which Ruskin drafted in stints of two to five stanzas, the stints appearing intermittently amid shorter poems. This procedure is consistent with how Ruskin worked in MS VI, a rough‐draft notebook used from late 1830 through 1831. In that earlier manuscript, too, Ruskin alternated draft of the epic‐length travel poem, “The Iteriad”, with composition of shorter poems. In fact, the two epic projects overlap briefly at the beginning of MS VIII, with a small portion of the fourth book of “The Iteriad” situated immediately following the notebookʼs first stint of “Athens” stanzas (see Discussion).

Within section a of the Contents, two subsections can be discerned: list a.1, terminating approximately with draft related to an occasional work celebrating John James Ruskinʼs 10 May 1832 birthday, draft that presumably was originally followed by a hiatus in composition during the familyʼs summer Tour of 1832 to Hastings and Dover; and list a.2, likewise terminating with draft related to Ruskinʼs fatherʼs birthday—this for 10 May 1833.

The subsection list a.1 represents by far the greater amount of poetic activity, this period marked by the completion in draft and fair copy of one epic, “The Iteriad”; the inception (albeit not completion) in draft and fair copy of another epic, “Athens”; and the drafting of more than thirty shorter poems, many of which Ruskin fair‐copied in MS V. The poetry in this section returns repeatedly to the locale and imagery associated with Wales, where the family had journeyed for the Tour of 1831, immediately prior to Ruskinʼs first use of MS VIII (see Discussion).

The following subsection, list a.2, is considerably briefer, containing no major poetic projects such as epics, and consisting of only about five shorter poems. The topographical orientation shifts from Wales to Scotland and the Lake District, and the Scottish associations are solemnized by the death of Walter Scott, for whom Ruskin wrote an elegy. A demarcation of list a.2 from list a.1 is open to argument, with differing scenarios placing the last known stanza of “Athens” prior to or following the Tour of 1832. See the caveats discussed in “Athens”: Date. In any case, the “Athens” project withered during this period of comparative austerity in poetry writing.

Following John James Ruskinʼs 10 May 1833 birthday, represented in MS VIII by “My Fatherʼs Birthday: The Month of May”, the family departed on the Tour of 1833. Thus, what may in retrospect be considered the end of section a, and the start of a new major section of the notebook, section b, is declared by Ruskinʼs ceasing work on “Athens” (at least as composed here), as his long poem of choice. In its place, he gave his attention to drafting the metrical and prose journal relating to the Tour of 1833, the Account of a Tour on the Continent.

To determine the probability of what draft in section b of MS VIII that Ruskin intended for the “Account”, one looks to the fair copy of the work in MS IX and, since the fair copy is incomplete, also to Ruskinʼs ambitious Plan for Continuation of the Account of a Tour on the Continent, compiled on the inside back endboard and flyleaf of MS VIII (see below, Contents, section j). See Table 1 in the apparatus for the “Account”, to compare the sequence of the prose and verse sections of the work as these appear in the various draft and fair‐copy witnesses and in the proposed plan for the work.

In section b of the manuscript, no title declares the segue to the new project, which Ruskin had begun drafting elsewhere—a stage of “Account” project represented by sheets now bound in MS IA. In MS VIII, following “My Fatherʼs Birthday: The Month of May”, Ruskin merely drew a horizontal line; and, below this, he composed “Oh are there spirits, can there be”, lines that have not been identified with a specific section of the “Account”, but that seem “descriptive, probably, of the Alps”, as the editors of the Library Edition suggest (Ruskin, Works, 2:384 n. 1). While no evidence definitively ties this brief lyric to the “Account”, ample clues identify the following prose essay with the longer work. The title of the essay, “The Source of the Arveron”, was likely meant as a section heading for both the essay and the poem following it, “I woke to hear the lullaby” (separately entitled [“The Arve at Chamouni”] by W. G. Collingwood). Together, the essay and poem can be identified with a unit in the Plan for Continuation of the Account of a Tour on the Continent. Either immediately before or after “Oh are there spirits, can there be”, there would have occurred a gap in Ruskinʼs use of the notebook, during which the family was touring the Continent. It is unlikely that he carried MS VIII with him on the journey, since he began the “Account” in other manuscripts, turning to this rough‐draft notebook only after he was well along in both draft and fair copy, probably in about in February 1834 (see Account of a Tour on the Continent: Date).

There are other clues, albeit of questionable reliability, indicating whether the prose and verse drafts in section b belong to the “Account”. First, the scope of Ruskinʼs page numbering, pp. 1–55, roughly comprises section a of the manuscript, with the final work in that section, “My Fatherʼs Birthday: The Month of May”, concluding on p. 53. Only two more numbered pages extend beyond the implicit gap into the renewed use of the notebook for composition of the “Account”. Second, beyond p. 55 Ruskin left section b unnumbered, suggesting that he regarded his earlier page numbering as unrelated to the new project. Instead, he started a new numbering system, associating the draft poems (not the prose) for the “Account” with line numbers, which run continuously from poem to poem. He used the same system of continuous line numbering for the MS IA witnesses of the “Account”. The line numbers for the two sets of witnesses are compatible, with the MS IA range of 1–429 fitting within the MS VIII range starting with “520”, although the two ranges are separated by an unaccountable gap.

Although compatible, tne two sets of line numbers divided between the two groups of witnesses are crude and open to considerable speculation if one attempts to use the numbering to draw conclusions about the sequence of composition or the sequence of witnesses intended for fair copy. In MS IA, the draft of the “Account” consists of three separate sheets, on which the verse is line‐numbered respectively 1–51, 52–204, and 324–429. (The draft appears to be semi‐final fair copy, so the line numbering may have originated with earlier draft, now lost.) In the first two sheets, the witnesses are ordered in the same sequence in which the poems are arranged in the fair copy in MS IX. In the third sheet of draft in MS IA, despite the continuous numbering, 324–429, the witnesses are not arranged in a sequence that would be maintained in fair copy, and clearly were not meant to be so. The same is true of the witnesses in MS VIII, in which the lines of poetry are numbered sequentially and continuously from poem to poem, although the sequence of composition bears little relation to the topographical sequence that the individual witnesses would occupy in the fair copy.

If crude, the line numbering in MS VIII is somewhat helpful in discerning the scope of the draft for the “Account”. The line numbering commences with the fifth line of “Oh are there spirits, can there be”, thus providing the most direct evidence that Ruskin intended this lyric for the “Account”. Ruskin assigns the fifth line of the poem the number “510”, and the tenth line “515”. Four more lines take the poem to the bottom of the page (p. 53); and then the following page, a verso, plus a third of the following recto are taken up by the prose piece, “The Source of the Arveron”, which carries no line numbers. The line numbering resumes with “520”, assigned to the next occurring poem, “I woke to hear the lullaby” (p. 55)—the sequence picking up correctly from line 519 at the bottom of p. 53. Despite this regularity at the start, toward the end of section b the continuous line numbering extends into works that Ruskin certainly did not intended for the “Account” (e.g., “The Crystal Hunter”), probably because he sometimes numbered the ruled lines of the notebook ahead of composition, and then neglected to erase the numbers when he departed from composition of the “Account”. One might infer from this anomaly that the relation of the line numbering in section b to the “Account” is accidental, as if Ruskin were merely counting the number of lines of verse—any verse—composed per day. This probability is foiled, however, by the opposite anomaly, the abrupt cessation in line numbering for verse that seems unrelated to the surrounding topographical description of the journey (e.g., the mysterious fragment, “The lake smiled sweetly, and the boy”.

As the surest and most valuable evidence afforded by the line numbering in section b, the sequence of verse and prose sections of the “Account” in MS VIII can be compared as a reliable sequence of composition against the sequence of fair‐copying in MS IX. Sections that appear relatively early in the MS IX fair copy—such as the prose sections for “Part of Brussels” [part 1], “Part of Brussels” [part 2], “The Meuse” [prose], and “Cologne” [prose], which belong to the first stage of the work recounting the journey through northern France, Belgium, and Prussia—in MS VIII occur as drafts intermixed with sections that Ruskin destined for the later Italian and Swiss stages of the work (sections that, as it happened, he never got around to fair‐copying). Thus, the sequence of composition reflects the pace of Ruskinʼs fair‐copying in MS IX, as he was simultaneously composing prose and verse for the later portions of the work. This evidence allows for fairly precise reconstruction of the process and dating of composition (see Account of a Tour on the Continent: Date of Composition and Composition and Publication—Drafting the Composite‐Genre Travelogue [MS VII, MS VIII, MS XI]).

Thus, section b of MS VIII contains significant, if sometimes unclear evidence of Ruskinʼs patterns of composition in 1834. The pattern shows that, in this section, Ruskinʼs activity was as homogeneous as it had been varied in section a. Not that he had become single‐minded in his pursuits. Throughout the first half of 1834, while continuing composition of the “Account” in MS VIII, along with the workʼs fair‐copying and illustration in MS IX, he continued his lessons with tutors, along with other kinds of writing—scientific, mathematical, and probably theological (see Discussion). Rather, section b suggests that Ruskinʼs pursuits had become more distinctly categorized and focused than formerly—focused both on a single literary work within this section of as MS VIII, and divided into distinct disciplinary activity in other noteboooks. At the same time, the “Account” as a literary project is ekphrastic and multi‐genre, defined by a principle of mixed kinds, as Ruskin elaborated what was originally a solely verse travelogue into a composite‐genre prose and verse, and illustrated travelogue. As such, the project reflects Ruskinʼs awareness of the miscellaneity and burgeoning technologies in the print culture of travel literature in the 1830s. His engagement with this print culture was rewarded by a commission in 1834 to revise a portion of the “Account” for publication, as well as to compose a new topographical poem as an ekphrastic complement to an engraving—both poems published in Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV, as Ruskinʼs first verse publications in a widely distributed venue (see Account of a Tour on the Continent: Composition and Publication—Friendshipʼs Offering (November 1834)).

Drafting the “Account” was interrupted when Ruskinʼs energies are deflected into revising and composing for Friendshipʼs Offering, and also preparing occasional poems for his fatherʼs May 1834 birthday. Understanding this endpoint of section b leads to considerable revision of the timeline for composition of MS VIII that W. G. Collingwood proposes in his “Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems” (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:264–65; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:265–66).

Collingwood argues that the stopping point for the “Account” draft falls on “p. 106”—that is, the two‐page spread, 80v–81r, containing the poem, “Villa Pliniana”, which he calculated as pp. 105–6 based on Ruskinʼs page numbering earlier in the notebook. (These pages still carry Collingwoodʼs penciled numbering; see Contents, section b.2). Collingwood calculated that, by the time Ruskin reached this page, he had been composing the “Account” through about December 1834. Then at this point, Collingwood says, Ruskin skipped ahead in the manuscript to compose New Yearʼs and birthday odes for 1835; he then returned to pp. 105–6, where he had left off drafting the “Account”, in order to compose a poem connected with the Tour of 1835 to the Continent—namely, the poem, “Saltzburg”, which falls on pp. 81r–81v, following “Villa Pliniana”. This is incorrect, as argued in Account of a Tour on the Continent: Composition and Publication, and in Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”. Rather, perhaps as early as March or April, certainly no later than sometime in May through July 1834, and not in December 1834, Ruskin abandoned work on the “Account” and turned to his commissions for Friendshipʼs Offering. To compose the poem, “Saltzburg”, moreover, Ruskin did not return to this place in the notebook after having jumped ahead; rather, he composed it here as a contemporaneous extension and outgrowth of his work on the “Account”.

Collingwood proposed a more complicated “stratification” of Ruskinʼs layerings of writing in MS VIII, because he incorrectly assumed that Ruskin would have written about a place, Salzburg, only if he had visited the city, whereas in fact Ruskinʼs first visit to the city occurred toward the end of the familyʼs Tour of 1835, almost a year after his poem was published. Ruskin based his poem, not on an experience of tourism, but on an ekphrastic description of an engraved view of the city. The plate was assigned to him by Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), the editor of Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV, an assignment that Pringle could have given Ruskin later than when he was compiling the volume for press in summer 1834 for an August deadline (see Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 188). For the same volume of Friendshipʼs Offering, Ruskin revised poems originally composed for the “Account”—namely, “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”—to form “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” (a revision not reflected in extant draft in MS VIII).

If the draft of “Saltzburg” in MS VIII is more accurately understood as a sequential extension of the “Account” project—in the sense, not that this poem was ever intended for that project, but that, as an ekphrastic and topographical poem, it can be viewed as the culmination of what Ruskin was exploring in the longer composite work—the end of section b is also cluttered with draft that is unrelated or only questionably related to the “Account”. A prose work immediately following the “Saltzburg” draft, “There were sweet sounds mingled with my dreaming”, is written in the ink and hand used for “Saltzburg”, but its purpose is obscure. Other works mixed among the later pieces drafted for the “Account” are clearly purposed to celebrate John Jamesʼs 10 May 1834 birthday, and thus help to date this portion of section b, list b.2, of the notebook. (Correspondingly, section a, list a.2, concludes with draft related to John Jamesʼs 10 May 1833 birthday.) These works include “The Address”, “The Vintage”, and “The Crystal Hunter”. Ruskin was working on the latter poem—the “Geological poem”, as he called it—at the time of a 22 February 1834 letter (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 280), but his composition of these works in list b.2, probably carried at least well into March–April 1834.

Presumably, section b, list b.2, of MS VIII concluded with the familyʼs departure for the Tour of 1834. Collingwoodʼs idea was that Ruskin left blank the pages following section b in order to leave space for continuing to draft the “Account” (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:264; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:266). That reconstruction does conform logically with Ruskinʼs compiling on the back endboards the Plan for Continuation of the Account of a Tour on the Continent. What came to fill this space, sequentially from “Saltzburg” on 82r and following, is writing that Collingwood assumed to be related to the Tour of 1835. While his idea was prompted by a misreading of the date and occasion of “Saltzburg”, the hand used on 82r “The Ascent of the St. Bernard: A Dramatic Sketch” does appear in a distinctly lighter ink; and the following group of sketches, tales, and lyrics may indeed form a chronologically distinct section of the notebook (section e), which seems to have been inspired by travel to the Continent in 1835, the pieces being set on the St. Bernard and in Venice. The pieces can equally be associated, like “Saltzburg”, with Ruskinʼs writing for the annuals; and he may have used the blank section of MS VIII following that poem precisely because of that association.

Where in MS VIII, then, did Ruskin go for continuing use of the manuscript following the familyʼs return from (or during) the Tour of 1834? Collingwood pegged this new start on “p. 168” (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:264; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:266). This is a recto, 112r, on which Collingwoodʼs penciled notation is still visible in the upper right corner. Physical evidence does support the suggestion of a new departure at this point, with the poetry running up to this recto on the facing verso being suddenly crowded into two columns—an unusual format for Ruskin in the bound notebooks, and suggesting that he ran up against an obstacle on 112r. This section of MS VIII (Contents, section d) begins with a poem for New Yearʼs 1835, “As I was walking round by Peckham rye”. If this is where Ruskin resumed work following the 1834 tour, he would have skipped 30 leaves (from 82r, where section b ends with “There were sweet sounds mingled with my dreaming”, to 112r, where section d begins with “As I was walking round by Peckham rye”). Thirty leaves forms a great length of space, but Ruskinʼs plans for the “Account” remained ambitious when his work was interrupted earlier in the year.

As Collingwood remarks, “As I was walking round by Peckham rye” is “the poem from which ‘The Months’ is extracted”, referring to Ruskinʼs contribution to Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXVI (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:265, 284; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:266, 286). This 1836 volume of the annual would have been published in October or November of 1835, in time for the holiday season of Christmas 1835 and New Yearʼs 1836. Since the holiday season culminating in New Yearʼs 1835 had been marked by Ruskinʼs first appearance in Friendshipʼs Offering, in the volume, Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV, (containing “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” and “Saltzburg”), it was appropriate that he mined his poem that he was preparing for New Yearʼs of the following year for his second appearance on the annualʼs pages.

MS VIII contains a second probable instance of Ruskinʼs having skipped ahead to set apart space for composition of a New Yearʼs poem. Upside‐down to the front of the notebook, and running reverso from the opposite end (and separated from the main text by blank leaves), Ruskin composed a small group of poems (Contents, section c) that includes “The dawn is breaking on the bending hills”, which internal evidence identifies as a New Yearʼs poem. Unlike the poem for 1 January 1835, “As I was walking round by Peckham rye”, no fair–copy presentation version of this poem is known to survive; and therefore, the stint of composition in section c cannot be securely dated. Collingwood attributes this group to “May–December, 1834; i.e., written after the Birthday‐poem [for John James] of 1834, which occurs in the middle of the 1833 ‘Tour’ [i.e., draft for the “Account”, list b.2,], and before he began his plan of the fresh section” section d, containing “As I was walking round by Peckham rye” (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:264; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:266). Collingwoodʼs suggestion is unlikely, since Ruskinʼs writing for December 1834 is already known to culminate in “As I was walking round by Peckham rye” as the New Yearʼs ode for that year.

Thus, in order to date section c, we must consider another New Yearʼs date that falls within the range of Ruskinʼs work in MS VIII and that lacks a known New Yearʼs ode. Possible dates are 1 January 1832, 1833, 1834, and 1836. Of these, 1 January 1832 can likely be eliminated, although not definitively, as the date of “Twelve months all rolling round have past”. Some evidence supports New Yearʼs 1834 as the date for “The dawn is breaking on the bending hills”, and thus circa December 1833 for section c, since the group includes Ruskinʼs poem on dancing, “Once on a time the wight Stupidity” [“The Invention of Quadrilles”]. In January and March 1834, John James Ruskin paid for dancing lessons (letter of 8 March 1834 [Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 282 n. 1]). A more impressionistic case might be made for assigning for section c to a year earlier, circa December 1832, and “The dawn is breaking on the bending hills”, to 1 January 1833, based on the poemʼs solemn tone, which speaks to John Jamesʼs depressed remarks to Richard Gray in January 1833: “We restrain [Johnʼs] poetic Efforts. He addressed me on New Years day only. If the Almighty preserves the Boy to me, I am richly blessed but I always feel as if I ought to lose him & all I have” (letter of 15 January 1833 [Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 276]).

We can reasonably conclude, then, that Ruskin produced Contents, section c as a stint of writing distinct from what he was drafting elsewhere in MS VIII at the time, but we cannot be certain whether that time was prior to New Yearʼs in winter 1832, or prior to that holiday in winter 1833. Oppositely, we can conclude with certainty that Ruskin produced Contents, section d prior to New Yearʼs in winter 1834, but we cannot be confident that this section represents a distinct stint, produced at a different time from what immediately precedes it. If another distinct stint is represented by the 30 leaves between section d, starting on 112r, and the “Account” project that, along with the associated revision and composition for Friendshipʼs Offering, left off at 82r in early summer 1834, then we can conceive of Ruskin returning to these available 30 leaves following the familyʼs second major Continental tour, the Tour of 1835, undertaken between June and December, since much of the writing filling that space is at least thematically related to places the family visited. In Collingwoodʼs interpretation, this post‐tour writing of late 1835 and 1836 carries forward to 1838 with lyric poems dedicated to Adèle Domecq, before running up against the pre‐existing section d of late 1834. Collingwood bases this surprising terminus ad quem on the date of 1838 he assigns to “Memory” [“The summer wind is soft and kind”]. In fact, the sequence of Ruskinʼs use of MS VIII may be even more complicated after Contents, section d, and his use of the 30 blank leaves requires subdividing into Contents, section e, section f, and section g.

In assessing Collingwoodʼs interpretation, one should bear in mind that the major metrical account of the 1835 tour, the “Journal of a Tour through France to Chamouni, 1835”, does not appear to be represented in MS VIII. In fact, no draft at all is known of the poem, its fair‐copy presentation alone surviving, in MS X. Even in this form, this latest topographical poem proved less ambitious than the 1833–34 “Account”, in that the “Journal” is not a composite of verse and prose, and its fair copy lacks illustrations or an engraving‐like “copperplate” hand. Ruskin apparently found sufficient ambition in imitating Byronʼs Spenserian stanza from Childe Haroldʼs Pilgrimage. What the initial use of the 30 leaves, section e of MS VIII, may represent, then, is the variety of genre that Ruskin filtered out, as it were, from his major metrical poem for the 1835 tour, as compared with the elaborately composite, illustrated “Account” produced in response to the 1833 tour.

As already cautioned, however, it is possible that, in filling the 30 leaves with a variety of genres—for example, a dramatic sketch, a tale—Ruskin was pursuing the thrill of publishing in the gift annuals. He may have begun section e in the second half of 1834, composing such works as “The Ascent of the St. Bernard: A Dramatic Sketch” and “Leoni”, not owing to visits the family would pay to the Hospice of St. Bernard and Venice in 1835, but because sketches and tales were germane to the literary annuals in which he had made his debut in 1834–35. The family visited the St. Bernard also in 1833; and one did not need to experience Venice first‐hand to wield the popular literary imagining of its setting. Regarded in that light, one can imagine the stint of writing in section e flowing sequentially and chronologically into the late‐1834 section d; or, if the latter did pre‐exist some portion of section e, the writing in section e may extend from mid‐1834 only until 1835–36, and not as late as 1838, as Collingwood believed.

If section e does flow into 1835–36, the Shelleyan quality of some of its lyrics may reflect the arrival of Adèle Domecq and her sisters at Herne Hill in January 1836. The story in Praeterita about Ruskinʼs infatuation with Adèle suggests an abrupt swerve to Shelleyan love poetry; however, the sequence of supposedly Adèle-inspired poems in MS VIII (section g) is continuous with the tour‐inspired shorter poems in section e. A transition between the two groups is marked by Venetian pieces that can be associated as much with the Byronic romance of the Continent as with adolescent worship of Adèle Domecq. For Collingwoodʼs idea that section g should be understood as extending into 1837–38, see “Memory”.

Following the late‐1834 section d occurs a small group of poems that may be simply an extension of section d into early 1835, but that may constitute a distinct section f from a later time. Following this group, in May 1836, during the early stage of the Adèle sequence in g, Ruskin used some more space (section h) to draft his fatherʼs birthday ode, “Congratu—”. After this, he continued with the verse drama “Marcolini”, for many pages.

The remainder of the contents of MS VIII, sections i and k, consists of slight sketches and lesson work.