versified. He looks towards the mountains from Marengo,

and speaks :

The glory of the cloud-without its wane;
The stillness of the earth—but not its gloom;
The loveliness of life-without its pain;
The peace-but not the hunger of the tomb!
Ye pyramids of God! around whose bases
The sea foams noteless in his narrow cup;
And the unseen movements of the earth send up
A murmur which your lulling snow effaces
Like the deer's footsteps. Thrones imperishable!
About whose adamantine steps the breath
Of dying generations vanisheth,

Less cognisable than clouds; and dynasties
Less glorious and more feeble than the array

Of your frail glaciers, unregarded rise,

Totter, and vanish.

Some lines on Mont Blanc, when he revisited it in 1845, have a solemn tenderness befitting a psalm or hymn.

Oh, mount beloved! mine eyes again
Behold the twilight's sanguine stain
Along thy peaks expire;

Oh, mount beloved! thy frontier waste
I seek with a religious haste,

And reverent desire.

Having referred to the worship which God "wins" from the lowlier creatures, "the partridge on her purple nest, the marmot in his den," he cries out in stern lamentation over the contrast to their "purer praise" afforded by that found upon the lips of men.

Alas, for man! who hath no sense
Of gratefulness nor confidence,
But still rejects and raves;
That all God's love can hardly win
One soul from taking pride in sin,
And pleasure over graves.

He checks himself, however, with a reflection which affects me with a sense of amazed pain, for again and again has the same occurred to me while reading his fiery invectives, hurled, in these last years, against men who,

faultily it might be, yet with sincere intention to speak truth and do good, have written what displeased him on social questions.

Yet let me not, like him who trod
In wrath, of old, the mount of God,
Forget the thousands left;

Lest haply, when I seek His face,
The whirlwind of the cave replace
The glory of the cleft.

Already he had looked with bitter sorrow into the mystery of evil, and found "worse treachery on the steadfast land than variable sea."

The treachery of the deadly mart
Where human souls are sold;
The treachery of the hollow heart
That crumbles as we hold.

In short, we have in these poems, as in a mirror, the faintly shadowed outline of all that Ruskin was to be. Their qualities are stateliness and chastened magnificence of language, burning purity of feeling, and elevation of thought. The most comprehensively characteristic, perhaps, of all the pieces, is one written when he was twentythree. No man is perfectly true to his own ideal, but when we look along the records of Ruskin's life, we can affirm that it has, on the whole, been pervaded with the spirit, the sentiment, the principles, of these noble verses :—

CHARITIE.

The beams of morning are renewed,
The valley laughs their light to see;
And earth is bright with gratitude,
And heaven with Charitie.

Oh, dew of heaven! Oh, light of earth!
Fain would our hearts be filled with thee,

Because nor darkness comes, nor death

About the home of Charitie.

God guides the stars their wandering way,
He seems to cast their courses free;
But binds unto Himself for aye,

And all their chains are Charitie.

When first He stretched the signed zone,
And heaped the hills, and barred the sea,
Then wisdom sat beside His throne,

But His own word was Charitie.

And still through every age and hour,

Of things that were and things that be,
Are breathed the presence and the power
Of everlasting Charitie.

By noon and night, by sun and shower,

By dews that fall and winds that flee,
On grove and field, on fold and flower,
Is shed the peace of Charitie.
The violets light the lonely hill,

The fruitful furrows load the lea;
Man's heart alone is sterile still,
For lack of lowly Charitie.

He walks a weary vale within,—

No lamp of love in heart hath he;
His steps are death, his thoughts are sin,
For lack of gentle Charitie.

Daughter of heaven! we dare not lift
The dimness of our eyes to thee:
Oh! pure and God-descended gift!
Oh! spotless, perfect Charitie.

Yet forasmuch Thy brow is crossed

With blood-drops from the deathful tree,

We take Thee for our only trust,

Oh! dying Charitie.

Ah! Hope, Endurance, Faith-ye fail like death,
But Love an everlasting crown receiveth;
For she is Hope, and Fortitude, and Faith,

Who all things hopeth, beareth, and believeth.

For reasons into which it is needless to inquire, Ruskin decided that he would not come before the world as a poet. His fame, however, has been too much for him; Mr. Shepherd's Bibliography of Ruskin states where each of his poems is to be obtained; and whoever chooses to

ransack the British Museum can have a sight of them. The volume in which most of them are collected is to be had, though seldom, in the book market. These facts make it absolutely certain that, if he does not appropriate them to himself by publication during his lifetime, some bookseller will publish them when he is dead. Surely it were best that he should publish them himself, stating how they fit into the story of his life, and what part they played in the development of his genius and the formation of his character. Information of this kind he has frequently given, and I, for one, have always prized and enjoyed the dainty morsels. The poems would give pleasure to many, and hurt or offend none, and could not possibly impair the reputation of Mr. Ruskin. They do not satisfy him; but if the satisfaction of authors, not the innocent pleasure of readers, is to be the rule of publication, vanity will publish everything, and pride will publish nothing.

TE

CHAPTER II.

HIS CHAMPIONSHIP OF TURNER.

HE work on Modern Painters, dedicated to the Landscape Artists of England, on which Ruskin's fame as an author was first reared, and on which it still principally rests, originated, as he tells us in the preface to the first edition," in indignation at the shallow and false criticisms of the periodicals of the day" on the works of J. M. W. Turner. I am desirous, in these after-dinner talks about 'my very noble and approved good masters," to avoid questions which might lead into the waters of controversial discussion; but it will be impossible to comprehend the literary career of Mr. Ruskin, unless we attain some clearness of idea respecting the necessity for that vindication of Turner which called him into the field.

It

He has maintained in all his books that Turner was treated with gross injustice by his contemporaries. is not true, however, that he has never given any other reason for writing on art than the compulsion under which he felt to defend Turner. In the preface to which I have just referred, he particularly fences himself against being supposed to be actuated merely by a desire to vindicate Turner's reputation. "No zeal," he says, "for the reputation of any individual, no personal feeling of any kind, has the slightest weight or influence with me. The reputation of the great artist to whose works I have chiefly