sians of the Guild of St. George,' said the painter, 'though you seem to look on its founder as a sort of glorified Hot-Gospeller in the midst of an unfeeling world.'

'I look on him,' rejoined his friend, 'as having a soul as sensitive to all forms of beauty as Shelley, one whose gift of prose speech reminds us of what Villani said of Dante, that "he had the most exquisite style that the language ever produced "-who has used this gift with unfaltering courage and perseverance to irradiate with ennobling ideas the whole field of morality, education, industry, art, poetry, and religion.'

'And we need not mind all that we find perverse and extravagant?' said the painter.

'Some day, perhaps,' said the other, 'a future generation will be able to take up these outpourings of the spirit, not to criticise and condemn what they find there to dispute or to laugh at, but in the way in which sensible men read Plato's Republic, or the book of Ezekiel, or Dante's New Life, to enjoy the melody of the language, the inspiring poetry, and their apocalyptic visions, without being disturbed in the least by all that is mystical, fantastical, impossible in the ideal of humanity they present.'

'Well,' said the painter, 'I will try them in that way, if I am not required to go to school with St. George. But how dark it has become whilst we have been talking! We shall hardly find our path down through the grove of yews.'

'Yes,' said the other, 'when I see how cold, dark, and monotonous the heaven has become, which an hour ago was aflame with fantastic forms of unimaginable beauty, I cannot help thinking of the peaceful sunset into which that fiery imagination has passed, so calmly

and silently awaiting the night in which no man can work. We can give no meaning in words to all the fitful shapes which just now we watched peopling the sky, nor can we read the messages with which those cloud-prophets seemed to glow. A gorgeous sky at sunset teaches neither science nor philosophy. But our spirits are attuned and our thoughts grow solemn and humane, albeit we know not why. We have seen the last ray of a glorious day.

"His memory long will live alone

In all our hearts, as mournful light
That broods above the fallen sun,

And dwells in heaven half the night."'1

So saying, the two men picked their footsteps down the steep path in silence and apart.

1 Tennyson, Lines to J. S.'

CHAPTER IV

RUSKIN'S EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY 1

(Feb. 8, 1819-1899)

TO-DAY the last survivor of the great writers in the first half of the reign attains the patriarchal age of fourscore years. John Ruskin keeps his eightieth birthday. It is sixty years since he published his first piece-the prize poem of 1839-a student's exercise, it is true, but one that was soon followed by the first decisive work of the Oxford graduate.' For fifty years from the early 'Newdigate' down to the last memoir in Præterita-a torrent of thought, fancy, and exhortation continued to pour forth from the fiery spirit endowed with the eye of the hawk. And now for ten years the old man eloquent has kept silence even from good words, resting in profound calm amongst those he loves, softly meditating on the exquisite things of nature and of art that surround him; his manifold work ended, his long life crowned and awaiting its final consecration: at peace with God and man.

We may all of us recall to-day with love and gratitude the enormous mass of stirring thoughts and melodious speech about a thousand things, divine and human, beautiful and good, which for a whole halfcentury the author of Modern Painters has given to

1 By kind permission of proprietors of the Daily Chronicle.

the world. We think of the immense range of these thoughts. They cover every phase of nature, every type of art, of history, society, economics, religion; the past and the future; all rules of human duty, whether personal or social, domestic or national. He had 'understanding exceeding much, and largeness of heart, even as the sand that is on the sea-shore,' . . . 'and his fame was in all nations round about.' He spake to us of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon unto the hyssop on the wall; he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes. He has put new beauty for us into the sky and the clouds and the rainbow, into the seas at rest or in storm, into the mountains and into the lakes, into flowers and the grass, into crystals and gems, into the mightiest ruins of past ages, and into the humblest rose upon a cottage wall. He has done for the Alps and the cathedrals of Italy and France, for Venice and Florence, what Byron did for Greece. We look on them all now with new and more searching eyes. Whole schools of art, entire ages of old workmanship, the very soul of the Middle Age, have been revealed with a new inspiration, and transfigured in a more mysterious light. Poetry, Greek sculpture, mediæval worship, commercial morality, the training of the young, the nobility of industry, the purity of the home-a thousand things that make up the joy and soundness of human life have been irradiated by the flashing search-light of one ardent soul. Irradiated, let us say, as this dazzling ray shot round the horizon, glancing from heaven to earth, and touching the gloom with fire. We need not, even to-day, be tempted from truth, or pretend that the light is permanent or complete. It has long ceased to flash round the welkin, and its very scintillations have disturbed

our true vision. But we remember still its dazzling power and its revelation of things that our own eyes had not seen.

What we especially love to dwell on to-day is this: that in all this unrivalled volume of printed thoughts, in this encyclopædic range of topic by this most voluminous and most versatile of modern writers (may we not say of all English writers ?), there is not one line that is base, or coarse, or frivolous; not a sentence that was framed in envy, malice, wantonness, or cruelty; not one piece that was written to win money or popularity or promotion; not a line composed for any selfish end or in any trivial mood. Think what we may of this enormous library of print, we know that every word of it was put forth of set purpose without any hidden aim, utterly without fear, and wholly without guile; to make the world a little better, to guide, inspire, and teach men, come what might, scoff as they would, turn from him as they chose, though they left him alone, a broken old man crying in the wilderness, with none to hear or to care. They might think it all utterly vain; we may think much of it was in vain : but it was always the very heart's blood of a rare genius and a noble soul.

Assuredly, this is not the day on which any man would criticise this mass of product or try to weigh its permanent result. Let to-day be given up to enjoyment and honour of what we have received from one who uttered nothing base.' A long life of battle, and strain, and affliction is ending now in a serene sunset and in recognised triumph. The world too often acknowledges its true teachers and prophets only when it begins to build them some belated tomb. This, at any rate, we will not suffer to be done to John