The phase of Ruskin's literary activity which followed the death of his father took the form of lectures and letters. The impulse towards the platform returned strongly upon him after a period of seclusion; he wanted once more to have his audience face to face, and to rouse them, if he might, to a sense of the evils which was burning within him. The manifold lectures, speeches, articles, and books, which he now poured forth, tell of abounding activity and untiring industry; but the work is very discursive. He talks and writes of books and how to read them; of the sphere and education of women; of soldiers and their duties; architects and their functions; servants and their loyalties; masters and their duties. He discusses now the elements of crystalisation or porches of Abbeville; and now the rights and wrongs of the Jamaica insurrection or the policy of nonintervention in European quarrels. He passes from the designs upon Greek coins to the management of railways and the prospects of co-operative industry.

The wide range over which he travelled at this time was due not only to an intellectual and artistic curiosity, as boundless as it was desultory; it was caused also by the conflict which had now become chronic between two sides of his nature.