Footnote 2, Chapter 4, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Wendell Stacy Johnson argues a more specific interpretation based on the poems: "For Ruskin, the merging of human feeling into natural object becomes necessary just because the remembrance of love's promise, too deeply or directly confronted, the realization of a sexual feeling smothered by his parents-in effect, by his father-is too painful" ("Memory, Landscape, Love: John Ruskin's Poetry and Poetic Criticism," Victorian Poetry 19 [1981], 24).
Last modified December 2000