In the first Fors of 1876 Ruskin reflected again on personal woes and Company progress:

The first four years had yielded little in the way of concrete achievements, but a reinvigorated Ruskin entered the second phase of the organisation's existence. Referring perhaps to spiritualist dabblings at the Mount-Temples Broadlands estate, he confided to Norton on 27 January 1875 that ‘all you said about my being among wrong sort of people has come home to me in a deadly way lately’. He had been ‘an infinite ass to let myself drift as I have’ (37.160). To arrest this drifting in Guild work, he had to confront key difficulties. That he did so, and achieved a great deal in the next three years, made the Guild's second phase its most productive, but while summer 1875 saw him proceed with zeal, the organisation's middle period would in many ways be yet more ‘unprosperous’ and ‘calamitous’ than the first by creating conditions that threatened to cast even greater discredit on all he attempted.