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 One soul from taking pride in sin, 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 Lest haply, when I seek His face, 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 twenty-three. 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 heaven with Charitie. Oh, dew of heaven! Oh, light of earth! God guides the stars their wandering way, And all their chains are Charitie. When first he stretched the signed zone, But His own word was Charitie. And still through every age and hour, Of things that were and things that be, By noon and night, by sun and shower, The violets light the lonely hill, The fruitful furrows load the lea; He walks a weary vale within, No lamp of love in heart hath he; HIS POEMS. Daughter of heaven! we dare not lift Yet forasmuch Thy brow is crossed With blood-drops from the deathful tree, Oh! dying Charitie. Ah! Hope, Endurance, Faith-ye fail like death, Who all things hopeth, beareth, and believeth. 379 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 pub.lish nothing. THE CHAPTER II. HIS CHAMPIONSHIP OF TURNER. HIE 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. He has maintained in all his books that Turner was treated with gross injustice by his contemporaries. It 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 referred, is established on too legitimate grounds among all whose admiration is honorable, to be in any way affected by the ignorant sarcasms of pretension and affectation." He wrote, he adds, to correct the taste of the public, HIS OBJECT IN WRITING. 381 misdirected by the same critics who attacked Turner. These taught their readers to look with contempt upon the most exalted truth, and the highest ideal of landscape, that this or any other age has ever witnessed." The two motives-to vindicate Turner and to purify the public taste-were blended in Ruskin's original impulse to write, and have been blended in all he has published on landscape art. He has sometimes, however, forgotten the fact. In the fifth volume of Modern Painters he says expressly that his books arose "not in any desire to explain the principles of art, but in the endeavor to defend an individual painter from injustice." This is, of course, irreconcilable with the denial, in his earliest preface, that "zeal for the reputation of any individual," or "personal feeling of any kind,” had “the slightest weight or influence" with him; but the slip of memory is of no great importance. Whatever were Ruskin's motives in writing or publishing, he has always, I repeat, declared Turner to have been treated with cruel injustice by his contemporaries. He told an Edinburgh audience in 1853 that, until seventy years old, the great artist never met with "a single word or ray of sympathy;" that "from the time he knew his true greatness all the world was turned against him;" that "no one understood him, no one trusted him, and every one cried out against him;" that every voice he heard from the human beings around him was raised, year after year, through all his life, only in condemnation of his efforts and denial of his success. Such statements are at first sight positively bewildering. To any one who has the slightest acquaintance with the history of art in England during the life of Turner, certain facts occur which, interpret them as we may, are indisputable, and which appear to be in absolute contradiction to Mr. Ruskin's words. Turner was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy at the extraordinarily carly age of twenty-four, a Royal Academician at twenty-seven; he exhibited about two hundred |