Ruskin composed the poem in blank verse, except for the final ten lines, which he headed “conclusion” in draft, and which he formed as rhymed octosyllabic couplets, perhaps influenced by Walter Scott. Structurally, the rough draft works by simple accretion, one section or strophe being added to the next using explicit transitions, such as “Ive treated of the clouds. now skiddaw come” and “Now derwent water come”. Writing the poem in stages, Ruskin changed from pencil to pen, and from one color of ink to another. Twice he interrupted composition of the poem with other texts. Given this structure of built‐up units over time, Ruskin treated the draft as both expandable and contractible—the contraction evident in a deleted ninth line, which could have triggered a premature ending, “Now hear my boyish moral”. Yet the poemʼs title suggests that, from the start, Ruskin projected his compound topic of mountain and lake; no evidence suggests that he decided seriatim to write first about Skiddaw and then to add a strophe about Derwent Water. The title containing the two place names shows no cramping on the page, as if he added the phrase “& lake derwent” as an afterthought. Overall, the poem represents a sustained and sophisticated effort, an advance in realized poetic ambition beyond anything Ruskin had both attempted and completed previously; and although its composition worked by accretion, compiling conventional picturesque tropes, the poem convinces as a whole.

In the progress of drafting the poem in MS II, Ruskin interrupts “description of skiddaw & lake derwent” twice by pausing to insert fragments of other texts, which form no part of the topographical poem. As explained in Date, the positions and content of these intervening texts help to date Ruskinʼs progress on the draft, and they also provide clues about the poemʼs social context, composition, and eventual presentation as a birthday gift for John James.

In 1829–30, Ruskinʼs original poem was revised and split into two poems for publication in the Spiritual Times: A Monthly Magazine. Thus, Ruskinʼs first poem to appear in print, and his first publication of any kind, was “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland. | Derwentwater”, which was signed “R—”, and which appeared in the 1 August 1829 (vol. 1, no. 4) issue. Ruskinʼs second publication was “On Skiddaw and Derwent‐Water”, which similarly was signed “R.”, and which appeared in the February 1830 (vol. 1, no. 10) issue. The responsibility and authority for the splitting and revision of the poem are unknown. As the editors of the Library Edition speculate, the revision presumably was guided either by the magazineʼs editor, the Reverend Edward Andrews (1787–1841), or by Ruskinʼs father, John James Ruskin, or by both of them. Scholars have weighted the responsibility on the fatherʼs side (see, e.g., Maidment, “‘Only Print’”, 196), but John Jamesʼs influence has probably been taken too much for granted. As shown in Composition: The Influence of Edward Andrews, Andrewsʼs mythology lessons are perceptible even in the draft.

The available evidence of another hand besides Ruskinʼs in the compositional process is slight. At lines 23–24 (“Lower than Alps or Andes” [MS V]), the MS II draft shows a substitution of “For less” in place of “lower”, which was written in a different medium than the underlying text, and which appears to be in the hand of John James Ruskin. The substitution was not used in the MS V fair copy, so one may infer that the change represents a stage of revision following Ruskinʼs presentation of the poem for his fatherʼs birthday. The published version does show an alteration from the fair‐copy text at this point, but not quite the same substitution (“Though less than Andes, or the Alpine heights”).

The first stage of the two‐part publication in Spiritual Times—the shorter poem, “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland”—was formed by isolating the “conclusion” (beginning “sweet derwent on thy winding shore”) of the original draft. (In the fair copy, “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water”, contained in “Battle of Waterloo, A Play, in Two Acts, with Other Small Poems”, this concluding section is not subtitled “conclusion”, but it is marked by a horizontal bar above its first line, as in the MS II draft.) Isolating these concluding lines for publication was easy, since they were already set apart from the main body of poem by their octosyllabic couplets and their sublime, rather than picturesque mode (see Composition of the “Conclusion” and Parental Demands for Completion). Revision of just ten lines was possible between the May presentation to John James and the August publication date, whereas revision of the main body of Ruskinʼs original poem apparently required the later publication date of February 1830.

There was time enough, nonetheless, for the ten‐line conclusion to undergo several minor revisions and one major development to arrive at “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland”. The major change transfers the reflection of lightning over Mount Helvellyn from the outer surface of a “mountain rill” to an internalized play “oeʼr the Poetʼs eye” and warming of his “heart”. In a brief space, the aesthetic paradigm shifts from mirror to lamp, imitation to expression. Yet the Romantic paradigm is instantly quelled by the addition of a moralizing couplet, raising the total number of lines from ten to twelve, which deprives the Poet of solace in nature: “Though such thy glories Earth, thy proudest whole, / Can never satiate the grasping soul!” Similarly, when the remainder of the poem was revised for publication in February 1830 as “On Skiddaw and Derwent‐Water”, the manuscript originalʼs reference to the “happy day” of John Jamesʼs birthday was not just omitted as being irrelevant to the poemʼs new context; the “happy day” was obliterated by seven lines of apocalyptic imagery, culminating in the “great day of fire the general grave”. (This imagery includes a reference to the “fall” of Herculaneum, a topic that seems particularly likely to have originated with Andrews; see contextual notes to “On Skiddaw and Derwent‐Water” [February 1830] and to versions based on that copytext.)

H. Robertson Nicoll, who unearthed the “Lines” from the Spiritual Times in 1895, declared that it was Andrews who “contributed the last two lines, the youthful poet being unable to find an appropriate conclusion” (Nicoll, “First Published Writings of Mr. Ruskin”). It is unclear how Nicoll arrived at this conclusion, since he had no access to the manuscript versions, draft or fair copy, lacking the couplet. Perhaps, since he gained access to a rare set of the journal issues with the assistance of the Andrews family, they made him privy to family stories about the Reverend Andrewsʼs part in revising Ruskinʼs poem (see The Rediscovery of Ruskinʼs First Publication). More likely, Nicoll compared the “Lines” as published in the Spiritual Times with the text of “Derwentwater” as edited by Collingwood from the MS II “description” and published in 1891: this text ends with Ruskinʼs original conclusion, lacking the two lines found only in Spiritual Times. Noticing the shift in tone, Nicoll may have decided that the additional couplet can only have been the work of a clergyman rather than of a ten‐year‐old (see Editing for Publication in Poems [1891]).

At the same time, the revised version for the Spiritual Times intensifies the originalʼs theme of playfulness. In lines 12–16 of the revision, the originalʼs description of “straggler” roots is caught up in a simile about the rambunctious play of an “urchin boy”, whose foot tramples and “dissolves” the root‐bound “mould”, just as the dissolving shapes in the clouds chase away one anoother. The added simile parallels Ruskinʼs own original simile of a “boy at play / who labours at the snow to make a man / And when heʼs made it knocks it down again”. As Nicoll concluded from his study of the magazine, Andrews did not intend Spiritual Times to be conventionally religious, and yet it is in fact conventional in its piety, if unexpectedly varied in content (see Discussion). Just so, Andrews seems to have been capable equally of pairing Ruskinʼs snowman maker with a playmate in the urchin boy and of dampening that playfulness with a cautionary couplet.

John James Ruskin and W. H. Harrison omitted the poem from the privately printed Poems by J.R. (1850). They had not forgotten the poem—at least not entirely. In the List of Ruskinʼs Published Poems, 1830–46, which John James compiled sometime in the 1840s (probably during or after 1846, using blank pages remaining in MS IV), he began with the entry, “on Skiddaw & Derwent Water | page 72 Spiritual Times | Feby 1830 age 11 years”. No mention is made, however, of “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland”. While it seems surprising that the admiring father could have forgotten Ruskinʼs very first appearance in print, bibliophilesʼ fascination with what were called “firsts” or “early editions” by modern authors became a phenomenon only at the end of the nineteenth century. John James was interested in preserving only the “best” of his sonʼs early publications in the collected volume—and for him, the “best” seems by definition to have precluded early, much less first, publications. He also rejected reprinting of Ruskinʼs first high‐profile verse publication, the poem “Saltzburg” for the gift annual, Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath: A Christmas and New Yearʼs Present, for 1835 (see Collecting of Modern Authors in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries; see also and Poems [1850]). In the List of Ruskinʼs Published Poems, someone—perhaps, John James—scored through the “on Skiddaw & Derwent Water” entry in pencil.

Meanwhile, why did Ruskinʼs previous—and therefore actually first—publication in the Spiritual Times, “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland | Derwentwater”, remain undetected? In fact, the discovery of both texts in the Spiritual Times—“On Skiddaw and Derwent‐Water” as well as “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland”—were rediscovered and made public in 1895. Curiously, this recovery was not acknowledged in the Library Edition, an oversight that consigned the “Lines” to its seemingly fated obscurity for another century. Nor did Cook and Wedderburn acknowledge this reprinting of “On Skiddaw and Derwent‐Water” from the Spiritual Times prior to their own.

The discovery, or at least the publicizing and reprinting, of the Spiritual Times publications must be credited to the journalist and book collector, H. Robertson Nicoll (1851–1923), who in June 1895 published a brief article, “First Published Writings of Mr. Ruskin”, in a journal that he founded and edited, the Bookman.

Nicoll does not explain what led him to hunt down the magazine. Did he spot Collingwoodʼs citation from John James Ruskinʼs List of Published Poems, 1830–46, and follow the trail that Collingwood had left cold (see Editing for Publication in Poems [1891])? Nicollʼs acknowledgment of the “kindness” of Eliza Orme (1848–1937) suggests that he realized the Andrews family was a likely source for a full run of the Spiritual Times—“one of the rarest pieces of Ruskiniana”, as James S. Dearden would remark decades later (Dearden, Ruskin, Bembridge, and Brantwood, 214).

On the evidence of Cook and Wedderburnʼs transcription of “On Skiddaw and Derwent‐Water” from the Spiritual Times, the editors (who do not mention, incidentally, where they obtained a copy of the magazine) did not view Nicollʼs transcription—or, if they did see it, did not allow themselves to be guided by its choices. As described in the textual notes to the Bookman transcription, it contains (along with some minor alterations in punctuation) at least two significant departures from the Spiritual Times text, which do not appear in the Library Edition transcription. If Cook and Wedderburn allowed their eye to be guided by any predecessor, it was Collingwoodʼs texts, as indicated by the Library Edition version of “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water”, based on the Spiritual Times text (see the textual glosses on their division of the poem into two stanzas, following Collingwoodʼs division of the text, not the undivided copytext; and on the phrase “Chasing the others off”, which the editors could have adopted only from Collingwoodʼs text). The Library Edition also reverts to Collingwoodʼs text in some details of “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water”, based on the MS V text (see the textual gloss on the usage of “Thus” for “Then”, which is supported only by Collingwoodʼs text, not the copytext). At least some of these preferences for Collingwoodʼs editing over the copytext at hand seem deliberate, whereas there is no evidence that Cook and Wedderburn even accidentally transmitted unique features in Nicollʼs transcription. (At the same time, it must be admitted that Cook and Wedderburn also may have silently rejected some of Collingwoodʼs transcriptions; see the textual note on the reading of “vain” for “fair” in “Skiddaw”.)

Accordingly, while it seems strange that Nicollʼs previous recovery of these texts was unknown to the editors of the Library Edition, they apparently were not acting disingenuously when, seven years later, they edited the second of the two poems, “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water”, based on copytext derived from the Spiritual Times, heralding this poem as “the earliest printed work of Ruskin” (Ruskin, Works, 2:265). They do not credit Nicollʼs article anywhere in the Library Edition. (In the “Addenda et Corrigenda”, no correction of the omission is made respecting either the bibliography of Ruskinʼs poems or the editing in volume 2 of the edition, although among the corrigenda to volume 34 the editors do quote from a different article by Nicoll published in the Bookman; see Ruskin, Works, 38:381.) Thus, Cook and Wedderburn perpetuated the neglect of the prior publication of “Lines”. That correction awaited a second rediscovery by James S. Dearden, who published a note, “John Ruskinʼs First Published Work”, in 1994, almost a century following the appearance of Nicollʼs brief article. (In his note, Dearden, like Cook and Wedderburn, failed to record Nicollʼs prior discovery; however, he intended to write a longer article, kindly relinquishing the project in deference to what has ultimately become this apparatus, and no doubt his unfailingly impeccable scholarship would have lead him to these same surprising results.)

The cul de sac of Nicollʼs scholarship is striking in view of the phenomenon of the Collecting of Modern Authors in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, which prompted keen rivalries for obtaining “early editions” of modern authors at high prices on the rare book market. Two circumstances may have blunted Nicollʼs coup from causing its due sensation. First, two years earlier, in 1893, James P. Smart and Thomas J. Wise had already published their Complete Bibliography of . . . Ruskin (1889–93), which supported Collingwoodʼs contention that Ruskinʼs first publication was the March 1834 prose piece for the Magazine of Natural History, the “Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine” (see Collingwood, Life and Work of John Ruskin [1893], 1:57, and see vol. 1, app., p. iv; Collingwood, Life of John Ruskin [1900], 41, 409). The bibliography identified, moreover, Ruskinʼs first published poem as “Saltzburg” in Friendshipʼs Offering (Wise and Smart, Bibliography of Ruskin, 2:123, 111). A second possible reason that Nicollʼs correction to the bibliography perhaps never gained traction was owing to the rarity of the Spiritual Times. Apparently, no copy ever appeared on the rare book market; and no fake was likely to be attempted—even by a forger as resourceful as Thomas J. Wise—given the detail about the original periodical that Nicoll had provided, based on a probably unique surviving copy that remained safe in private hands.

In “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water”, Ruskin made his most ambitious effort to date to engage with the conventions of the picturesque, which first appears in the juvenilia of 1827, when he gathered poems into a small anthology that he entitled “Poetry Discriptive”. That he was consciously writing the present poem in the same mode is implicit in his original title, “description of skiddaw & lake derwent”.

It is less clear whether Ruskin derived materials for the poem from picturesque journeying. The poems in “Poetry Discriptive” originated from a family tour in 1827 to Wales and Scotland, whereas the editors of the Library Edition believed that “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water” “must have been based on memories of a visit to the Lakes in 1826 (Ruskin, Works, 2:265 n. 1; and see Ruskin, Works, 1:xxv, and Burd, “Introduction” to Tour to the Lakes in Cumberland, 6–7, for possible earlier journeys to the Lake District). Evidence of such a journey in 1826 is elusive. Arguments for dating and mapping the early family journeys have tended to work in circles, with Ruskinʼs dateable poems about locales cited as evidence for the journeys that are used to contextualize those very poems. In the present instance, as argued in Tours of 1826–27, while the Lakes was a possible destination in both 1826 and 1827, no direct evidence attests to a visit. (As also argued, it is possible that an alleged 1826 northern journey might not have occurred at all, but may be a mistaken reference to an 1827 journey that included Wales and Scotland but not necessarily the Lake District.)

Biographically, perhaps the most significant influence on Ruskinʼs composition of his poem was a journey that definitely failed to materialize. In 1828, the family embarked on a “great tour” destined for the Lakes; however, they cut the trip short when they had gotten only so far as Cornwall, where they received news of the death of John James Ruskinʼs sister, Jessie (1783–1828). Ruskin may have been moved to write about these scenes for his fatherʼs 1829 birthday as a compensation for the lost tour, and as an anticipation of the grand tour to come, the Lake District Tour of 1830, which the family was probably already planning in 1829. For this purpose, Ruskin could have relied on an engraving of the scene to supply the place of memory. “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water” is a distinctly joyous poem, but its point may have been to dispel memories of grief rather than to record them. (For another topographical poem that may have been connected therapeutically with grief, see “On Scotland”.)

Despite the grief associated with the aborted tour of 1828 to the Lakes—and despite the occasional patch of mountain gloom in the poem itself, such as the fatality that threatens the shepherd—the origin of “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water” lay more in laughter than in tears, and that tenor was not necessarily altered by the poemʼs publication in a religious journal. Ruskinʼs amusement by Andrewsʼs teaching style has already been remarked as an inluence on the poemʼs composition (The Influence of Edward Andrews on Initial Composition); just so, the pleasantries of a secular, picturesque poem were not out of place in Andrewsʼs new periodical, which the editor‐clergyman promised would “break out of the trammels in which other religious periodicals seem proud to confine themselves, and show that even piety may be connected with high talent, and that vulgarity of style is not inseperable with what are foolishly called high doctrines” (see The Rediscovery of Ruskinʼs First Publication). This advertisement was only one among several marks of the Andrews familyʼs cultivated tastes and social ambition, such as the fine organ installed in Beresford Chapel, a building that Andrews also owned (see Reverend Edward Andrews [1787–1841]). Like Ruskin, the Andrews children participated in these middle‐class ambitions, including making their own books by editing a family magazine, “The Beresford Spy” (Anstruther, Coventry Patmoreʼs Angel, 16–18).

The mission of Andrewsʼs magazine to “break out of the trammels” of sectarianism was not unique. The much longer‐lived Congregational magazine, the Eclectic Review (1805–68), likewise sought to undermine stiff‐necked Nonconformity and the supposed incompatibility of evangelical seriousness with a broad cultivation of literature and taste. In the Eclecticʼs first years, regular contributors included the essayist, John Foster (1770–1843), and the poet, James Montgomery (1771–1854). Theologically and politically, the Eclectic was committed to bridging the gap between Dissent and Establishment (Hiller, “Eclectic Review”, 179–86). On a broader scale, David Stewart has proposed that Romantic‐era magazines in general resisted becoming trapped in bunkered positions as culture fissured into competing disciplines and positions; instead, magazines sought a heterogeneous audience who in turn positioned itself in relation to a magazine culture and not just a single organ of opinion (Stewart, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture, 7–8). The editors of the Eclectic Review discovered, however, that an “eclectic” stance was difficult to maintain, and found themselves driven to promoting more decisively Nonconformist interests of civic and religious liberty in the turbulent period of reform.

Likewise, another heterogeneous periodical, the Patriot (1832–66), which was operated jointly by interests of Congregationalists and Baptists, struggled to build adequate support on a nationwide subscriber base of Dissenters who upheld loyalty to voluntaryism on the question of Church Establishment, but who shrank from identifying with radical Dissent. The newspaperʼs trustees turned to the experienced journalist, Josiah Conder (1789–1855), already editor of the Eclectic Review, to increase subscription, but the Patriot nonetheless almost foundered along with its editor because Conder was perceived as too soft on the question of Establishment even in the view of moderates, must less of the radical voluntaryists (Cooper, “Dissenters and National Journalism”). Given that the weekly Patriot and monthly Eclectic survived only by virtue of deft political and theological positioning, not to mention the hugely energetic labors of professional journalists like Conder, no wonder that the modest Spiritual Times failed to summon adequate support. In the magazineʼs final issue, Andrews attributed the failure to “want of encouragement” (see The Rediscovery of Ruskinʼs First Publication). Add to this the scale of the competition, with four thousand journal titles estimated to have been founded in Britain between 1790 and 1832, and Andrews was soon forced to shut down the costly venture within the first year of his magazineʼs publication (Anstruther, Coventry Patmoreʼs Angel, 16; Klancher, Making of English Reading Audiences, ix).

Compared to these national political struggles, the conflicts staged in the Spiritual Times are domestic in scale. In dueling correspondence on the “Religious Education of Children” contributed by “Rector” and “Cor‐Rector”, the former observes that “children of ministers turn out worse than others” for “when they do get into the world, they riot in it”. Having been “made to sit through a long form of worship before they can understand one word”, their overloaded “brains are turned”; and “growing older, and their wishes and desires expanding”, they nonetheless remain dangerously thwarted, “not allowed to read anything in a dramatic form,—good or bad,—nay” not even “any thing fictitious”. Cor‐Rector replies with an anecdote about a godly child who read Scripture from infancy, soon growing so fond of it that he became a prodigy. “As he grew older, and his desires expanding, what on earth could anything in a dramatic form benefit his mind, or the reading of any fictitious books? . . . Would not this supplant all the preceding labours bestowed on the child, and fill the library of his mind with gross fictions, and subverting from his heart in future days the fear of God, which was the beginning of his wisdom? . . . Hymn learning and hymn singing is charming, and more than refreshing from infants”. Rector considers such prodigies to be hypocrites. The argument goes nowhere, partly because the magazine stopped publication, but also because, despite the promise of the magazine to favor the “sprightly and elegant”, the editor declined from the start to speak courageously in favor of broad‐minded cultivation: according to the “Observations by the Editor” appended to Rectorʼs initial letter, “We insert the above letter because, in the main its assertions are just: but we think it dangerous to say any thing that might be mistaken as unfriendly to catechisms, and the learning of hymns, &c.; all of which, if not overdone, may be unspeakably useful” (“Rector”, “Letter concerning Severity of Religious Education” and “Observations by the Editor”; “Cor‐Rector”, “Religious Education of Children”; and “Rector” with rejoinder by “Cor‐Rector”, “Religious Education of Children”, in Spiritual Times, no. 3 [1 July 1829], 87–88; no. 7 [November 1829], 273–73; no. 10 [February 1830], 73–75).

Edward and Elizabeth Andrews did not educate their own children narrowly (see Andrews family). Nonetheless, the writing for the magazine by Andrewʼs eldest son, Edward was religious, according to Ian Anstruther (Coventry Patmoreʼs Angel, 17); and the following poem contributed by another juvenile writer to the magazine, “Lines by a Youth | Not Alone”, conveys the quality of a hymn that is seldom detected in the Ruskin juvenilia. The poem by the anonymous youth holds out comfort to “favourʼd souls” that “better know / The causes of terrestrial woe”:

A poet like this youth seems more likely than Ruskin to have found an appropriate ending to “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland” by repudiating the whole “Earth” for the greater “glories” needed to “satiate the grasping soul”; or to have improved “On Skiddaw and Derwent‐Water” by elevating Ruskinʼs humble imagining of a snowy “mauseleum for the careless swain” to an apocalypse “where the ocean swallows navies down, / Or yawning earthquke covers cities vast, / Shroudless, engulfed, without a knell or tear; / Or where another Herculaneum falls; / Or the great day of fire the general grave. / These are the tombs she makes, and buries all / Beneath them, but the soul; that, . . . scorns the dust”.

As a consequence, the tension between the magazineʼs embrace of both Romantic imagination and Evangelical otherworldliness appears to have set off a debate in MS II over the respective claims of worldly beauty and religious austerity.

Amid draft of “Eudosia” occur the fragments “These worldly things are fair and beauteous too” and “We say that this world is unhappy”. The debate—if debate it is—seems to culminate in MS II with another fragment, “If such the beauties of an earthly shore”, which is an almost illegible, scrawled draft that may bear witness to the revision process seeking the new concluding couplet for “Lines”—or the draft may be an attempt at revising “On Skiddaw and Derwent‐Water” for publication in February 1830, which similarly acquired an ending that “scorns the dust” of the “general grave”. If these fragments do represent the revision process, they must date from between 10 May 1829, when Ruskin wrote his letter presenting a fair copy of the poem to his father, and either August 1829, when “Lines” was published, or February 1830, when the revised main body of the poem was published (thus placing compostion and revision a full year or more after 1828, when Collingwood believed that Ruskin composed the poem; see Hanson, “Psychology of Fragmentation”, 254–55).