“For less than alps or andes pyrenees are all much higher” (MS II; MS V; Spiritual Times; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—The comparison of relative mountain heights derives from Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India by Reginald Heber, bishop of Calcutta (1783–1826), which Ruskin and his mother were reading in March 1829, using volumes borrowed from a circulating library. Ruskin kept up his father on their reading in a 10 March letter, reporting that they had followed Heber to “the Himmaleh those sublime mountains higher than chimborazo, the highest summit of the andes or cotopaxi the highest volcano” (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 193, and see 185). In the passage of the Narrative Ruskin summarizes, Heber refers to the Himalayas as “the highest spots below the moon—and out‐topping, by many hundred feet, the summit of Cotopasi and Chimborazo” (2:153).

Heberʼs description of his first sighting of the Himalayas must stand among Ruskinʼs earliest exposures to this evangelical typological trope of the Pisgah sight, as applied to travel narrative. The description is also Romantic in its inquiry into the psychology of viewing the prospect. Heber is reminded of scenery in Wales—where the Ruskins had toured two years earlier (Tours of 1826–27)—comparing “some views of Rhuddlan”, with its castle and the “Clwydian chain” beyond, to the approach to the Asian mountains, rising as “blue hills” behind a “great surrounding flat” with a ruined fortress on an eminence:

In the Spiritual Times version of Ruskinʼs poem, the comparison of mountain heights is curtailed, omitting mention of the Pyrennes. In Collingwoodʼs version, “Skiddaw”, the comparison is omitted altogether.

“those giant works of art” (MS II; MS V; Spiritual Times; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—In the fair‐copy version, in the manuscript, “Battle of Waterloo, A Play, in Two Acts, with Other Small Poems, Dedicated to His Father” (in MS V), Ruskin glosses the “giant works of art” with a footnote (indicated using an asterisk, *), identifying them as “The Pyramids”. Curiously, Collingwood annotates the passage in precisely this fashion, although the gloss does not appear in the MS II draft, to which he was supposedly limited. In the Spiritual Times version, the word pyramids is worked into the body of the poem, without the indirection.

“where another Herculaneum falls” (Spiritual Times; Bookman; Works [1903])—Ancient Roman city, destroyed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Excavations of the city along with Pompeii started in the early eighteenth century, but digs at Herculaneum were renewed in 1828, and extended through the period of the composition, revision, and publication of Ruskinʼs poem. Earlier excavations at Herculaneum had consisted mainly in tunneling, removing antiquities, and backfilling, so that there was little to be seen of the city structures apart from the amphitheater. The renewed excavations were aimed at laying bare structures and spaces such as what tourists were accustomed to viewing at Pompeii. Thus, in 1829–30, Herculaneum was prominent in the news; and since the reference to the site occurs only in lines added to the 1830 Spiritual Times version of Ruskinʼs poem, the idea probably originated with Edward Andrews, who as a classicist would have been interested in the antiquities, which included a library of papyrus rolls found at Herculaneum, raising hopes of finding lost classical texts.

In English literature, these treasures, along with the imagined drama of the disaster that buried the cities, were themes of poems about Herculaneum written in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including one by Wordsworth. In particular, the apocalyptic light surrounding the reference in Ruskinʼs poem probably reflects popular narratives of the 1830s that invented a Christian community living in Herculaneum and Pompeii at the time of the disaster. According to these stories, a Christian sect imbued with the “purity” of the primitive church was rescued from the Vesuvian punishment meted out to the pagan civilization for its decadence and stubborn refusal of the Christian call. Ruskinʼs poem was too early to have been influenced by the most popularly succcessful of these narratives, The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer‐Lytton, which the Ruskins probably acquired in the first year of its publication, 1834, but predecessors to the novel advanced the Christian theme. In one form, romances pretended to be derived from the charred scrolls discovered at Herculaneum. A tale in this genre was authored later in the 1830s by the Reverend George Croly, who mentored Ruskin as a rising young author. On the archaeology and literary response to Herculaneum, see Moormann, Pompeiiʼs Ashes, 52, 129–30, 399–409, 217–21, 224–30, 333–51; and on the Ruskinsʼ acquistion of Bulwer‐Lyttonʼs novel, see Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 286; Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin, 212 (no. 1636).

“Thus like penelope thou weavst . . . / and then thou dost undo it . . . / because thourt fair and oft deceiving too” (MS II; MS V; Poems [1891])—In book 2 of Homerʼs Odyssey, the suitor Antinous complains that Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, deceived the men suing for her hand by claiming she must first weave a shroud for Ulyssesʼs father, Laertes, while secretly temporizing by picking apart her work by night. In book 19, Penelope herself admits to the strategem for delaying remarriage.