MS IV is like some other Red Books (e.g., MS III and MS IIIA) in that it starts with a title page announcing a single work (see Title) but—Ruskin failing to realize the ambitious length and predominance of that work—the manuscript was left open to being filled by other kinds of writing. MS IV, however, was left with an unusually large blank section: from the page containing the final fair-copied lines of “Eudosia” (p. 17) to the Mineralogy Notes [ca. 1829] entered reverso from the other end, MS IV contained a section of 29 leaves, blank except for numbering on some pages, until two decades after its initial use, when John James Ruskin used some of those leaves for his catalog of his son’s published poems. Over time, Ruskin put space in other Red Books to various uses—the additional poetry anthologies in MS III, the mineralogy notes in MS IIIA (although that Red Book also retained blank sections extending to significant lengths), the sermon drafts in Juvenilia MS A. That Ruskin left so much of MS IV unused may suggest that he persisted longer in an intention to carry on with the manuscript’s main work, “Eudosia,” compared to ambitions for “Harry and Lucy,” which he relinquished more easily in MS III and MS IIIA. If so, his lingering ambitions for a long poem would be more expected than for Edgeworthian lessons, which he more quickly outgrew.
	If Ruskin had devoted additional Red Books to further “volumes” of “Eudosia”—beyond the first volume he planned for MS IV, which he gave over to the subject of “Botany”—he presumably would have continued to follow something like the plan found in his source, Lofft, Eudosia. Since Ruskin subdivides his first volume of his “Poem on the Universe” into “books” (of which he never got beyond the start of book 2), he is even more ambitious than Lofft, whose “Poem on the Universe” is divided only into books (not volumes containing books), of which the first is “The Earth,” corresponding to Ruskin’s “Botany.” It is possible that one of the fair-copy versions of “The Constellations: Northern, Some of the Zodiac, and Some of the Southern”—that in MS IA, or RF T70—represents a continuation of Ruskin’s scheme beyond the first volume in MS IV, as a volume on the stars would correspond to Lofft’s poem: see “Eudosia”: Discussion.