“The foam globes round come riding fast” (MS VIII; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—In the Library Edition, the editors remark that foam globe was "a favourite expression with Ruskin, and they point to instances here and in , “The Last Song of Arion”, “The Ascent of the St. Bernard: A Dramatic Sketch”, The Poetry of Architecture, and Modern Painters I (Ruskin, Works, 2:387, 62; and see 2:119; 1:508, 37; 3:426). The editors fail to identify the source of this poetic phrase, however, which was likely Walter Scottʼs Rokeby (1813), in the description of the vale of the River Greta in County Durham, near the riverʼs meeting with the River Tees, between Rokeby Manor and Mortham Tower. In his apparently initial adoption of the phrase, Ruskin borrows Scottʼs diction for a rocky, wooded Yorkshire stream and transplants it to open his poem describing the glacier torrent of the Arveyron. He takes both Scottʼs noun for the effervescent foam and the associated verb for its action on the current, but not Scottʼs moralizing similes:

The description occurs when Wilfrid Wycliffe is guiding the buccaneer, Bertram Risingham, from Barnard Castle to Mortham Tower to collect the treasure promised to the pirate by Wilfridʼs father, Oswald, for the murder of Philip of Mortham. In 1813, the year of the poemʼs publication, the young John James Ruskin penned a wry account of the narrative to his mother, Catherine, predicting that it “will never be much read & I hope the Reviewers will assist in checking the career of such loose & foolish poems. Mr. Scott consulted his fame in writing Marmion & the Minstrel—if he continues to value his fame he will write no more”. John James especially scoffed at the character of Wilfrid, a boy who is “very tender hearted, mild, shy, innocent, amorous, & sickly, very studious moreover”, and who “prefers sitting up all night hearing the wind howl & looking at the moon” in order to write poems about it, rather than “going like other folks to bed. . . . I expected the first Canto was to send this weekly youth to his grave in a galloping consumption . . . when lo! & behold he breaks out upon us all at once with a song & seems as well & merry as possible considering that he had nothing but the moon to sing to & not even a pipe nor a pot of porter to comfort him withall”. John James could not have predicted how uncannily the character would conform, two decades later, with that of the young John Ruskin (letter of 4 March 1813 [Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 63, 60]; and see Scott, Rokeby [1813], 36–51 [canto 1, stanzas 24–34]).

In 1823, a drawing of this Teesdale landscape by J. M. W. Turner was published as “Junction of the Greta and Tees at Rokeby”, engraved by John Pye, in Thomas Dunham Whitaker, History of Richmondshire (1:184 opp.; Ruskin later owned Turnerʼs original 1817 watercolor of this subject). By April 1834 at the latest, nearer the time of composing “The foam globes round come riding fast”, Ruskin could also have had access to another, very different conception of this subject by Turner, “The Junction of the Greta and the Tees”, also engraved by John Pye. This rendering served as a frontispiece for Rokeby, volume nine in the twelve‐volume Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., published in 1833–34 by Robert Cadell as an extension of the Magnum Opus edition of the novels. (See Finley, Landscapes of Memory, 30–32, 91–93; Millgate, Scottʼs Last Edition, 48.)

“Forth from his cold & silent tomb / Forth flies the river from the gloom” (MS VIII; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—The Arveyron, issuing from its source in the vault of ice, with which the Glacier du Bois terminated in the nineteenth century in the valley of Chamonix. See “Source of the Arveron” and associated glosses for the Ruskinsʼ tourism to this site, and “I woke to hear the lullaby” and associated glosses for Ruskinʼs first‐composed poem on this topic.