The King of the Golden River

by John Ruskin




PREFACE

"The King of the Golden River" is a delightful fairy tale told
with all Ruskin's charm of style, his appreciation of mountain
scenery, and with his usual insistence upon drawing a moral.
None the less, it is quite unlike his other writings. All his
life long his pen was busy interpreting nature and pictures and
architecture, or persuading to better views those whom he
believed to be in error, or arousing, with the white heat of a
prophet's zeal, those whom he knew to be unawakened. There is
indeed a good deal of the prophet about John Ruskin. Though
essentially an interpreter with a singularly fine appreciation
of beauty, no man of the nineteenth century felt more keenly that
he had a mission, and none was more loyal to what he believed
that mission to be.

While still in college, what seemed a chance incident gave
occasion and direction to this mission. A certain English
reviewer had ridiculed the work of the artist Turner. Now Ruskin
held Turner to be the greatest landscape painter the world had
seen, and he immediately wrote a notable article in his defense.
Slowly this article grew into a pamphlet, and the pamphlet into a
book, the first volume of "Modern Painters." The young man awoke