deep shade of the stately avenues, the whisperings among the branches seem to flow from the spirits of the place, giving back their portion of the record of our childish years; and we are reminded of the awe with which that shade impressed us, and of the first time we felt anything like fear, when, on a dark evening, the sudden cry of the screech-owl taught us that those trees had other inhabitants, besides the birds to which we listened with such delight by day.

Thus the whole of nature appears to us full of living echoes, to which we uttered our hopes and joys in childhood, though the sound of her response only now for the first time reaches our ears. Everywhere we, as it were, receive back the tokens of a former love, which we had too long forgotten, but which has continued faithful to us. Hence we shall return to our work in the world with a wiser and a truer heart, having learnt that this life is, indeed, the seed-time for eternity, and that in all our acts, from the simplest to the highest, we are sowing what, though it may appear for a time to die, only dies to be quickened and to bear fruit.

JOHN RUSKIN.'

1. REFLEX ACTION OF ART ON MAN'S CONCEPTIONS OF NATURE.

(FROM "THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE," PUBLISHED IN 1849.)

In the edifices of man there should be found reverent worship, and following, not only of the spirit which rounds the pillars of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenue,—which gives veining to the leaf, and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that agitates animal organisation, but of that also which reproves the pillars of the earth,2 and builds up her barren

(1) Ruskin has written much that the world will not willingly let die, and in a style strikingly original. The above specimens sufficiently prove this; but should only be regarded as an invitation to the feast of delight prepared for all thoughtful readers in his works. His style is distinguished for breadth of treatment and frequent splendour of colour. If he is not reckoned in after times the finest writer on art that England has ever produced, the fault will be his own. It will be because-not England-but himself does not sufficiently protect and maintain his great reputation.

(2) That also which reproves, &c. This expression cannot be commended for clearness and precision. It seems to mean-men's edifices should embody some

precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky; for these, and other glories more than these, refuse not to connect themselves, in his thoughts, with the work of his own hand; the grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some cyclopean waste of mural stone; the pinnacles of the rocky promontory arrange themselves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of fortress towers; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast from the images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered cities melt in their mortality.1

2. ASPECT OF NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN
COUNTRIES RESPECTIVELY.

(FROM "STONES OF VENICE," PUBLISHED IN 1851.)

THE charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science have thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of knowledge, but I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between northern and southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in their fulness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us for a moment try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: bere and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid thing of the vastness as well as the beauty of nature; though that vastness reproves all human reality-that is if the "pillars of the earth" means architectural columns. If it does not, then the meaning of " reproves" is still to seek.

(1) See some striking remarks on the aesthetic beauty of this passage in the "Fortnightly Review," ii. 698, by the editor, G. H. Lewes.

like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer to them with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm, that abate with their grey-green shadows the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent sand. Then let us pass further towards the north, until we see the orient colours change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils of the mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amid the northern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought this gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life: the multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or tread the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted leopards, glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us contrast their delicacy and brilliancy of colour, and swiftness of motion, with the frost-cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the northern tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard with the wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with the ospray; and then submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the earth and all that it bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not condemn, but rejoice in the expression by man of his own rest in the statutes of the land that gave him birth. Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and smooths with soft sculpture the jaspar pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when with rough strength and hurried stroke he smites an uncouth ani

mation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them.

3. ST. MARK'S AT VENICE.

(FROM THE SAME WORK.)

BEYOND those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away; a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light; a treasure heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother of pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory -sculpture fantastic and involved of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes, and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago; but round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to kiss "-the shadow as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand: their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs all beginning and ending in the cross; and above them in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life—angels and the signs of heaven, and the labours of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed into white arches edged with scarlet flowers, -a confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek

horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars; until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst.1

GEMS OF EXPRESSION."

ALL things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving.Coleridge.

The enthusiasm of the present age becomes the common sense of the next.-Id.

When we meet an apparent error in a good author, we are to presume ourselves ignorant of his understanding, until we are certain that we understand his ignorance.-Id.

In peace, children bury their parents; in war, parents bury their children.

If you wish to enrich a person, study not to increase his stores, but to diminish his desires.

Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools. He should consider often, who can choose but once.

No man was ever cast down by the injuries of fortune, unless he had before suffered himself to be deceived by her favours. To endeavour all one's days to fortify our minds with learning and philosophy, is to spend so much in armour, that one has nothing left to defend.

(1) It would be difficult-nay, more than difficult-impossible-to match the above passage by any other of a similar kind in the English language. To call it "poetical prose "is to degrade it to the level of much that is simply intolerable to read, and of which it is easy-too easy-to find specimens everywhere. When this wonderful passage has been read over half a dozen times, it will be more admired than at first. As a description of the actual building-open to the observation of all, on the Piazza at Venice-it is difficult to call it true; but it is more difficult to call it false. It is the idealised t. Mark's, as seen through the mist of time in the clear light of its first creation-and, indeed, further back still, in the artist's mind that conceived it-that the writer has placed before us; but we must yield ourselves up to the magic of his inspiration, before we can see what he shows us. The sacrifice, however, if it be one, is well worth making.

(2) These passages have been selected specially on account of the beauty or fitness of the language-the apt confluence of the manner with the matter. No attempt has been made at chronological arrangement.