and however much we may here again disagree with him, he had much that
was uplifting and inspiring to say to his time,--a time that had great
need of his apostolic counsellings and his fervent inculcations of
morality, industry, religion, and humanity.

Throughout Mr. Ruskin's works--and they are amazingly manifold--a strong
and intense purpose runs, given to the highest and noblest ends; and
though their author at times wearies his reader by his diffuseness and
his digressions, and to some is almost fanatical in his reverence for
art, he is ever imaginative and eloquent, and has created for us a new,
instructive, and uniquely fresh and thoughtful body of art-literature.
The truth of infinite value he teaches is "realism,"--the doctrine that
all truth and beauty are to be attained by a reverent and faithful study
of nature, and not, as a reviewer expresses it, "by substituting vague
forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of
definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine
would remould our life; and he who teaches its application, even to any
single department of human activity, and with such power as Mr.
Ruskin's, is a prophet for his generation." In all his various labors
and aims, Mr. Ruskin set before himself a high, if somewhat quixotic,
ideal of life, and with great earnestness did much, not only for the
elevation of his fellow-men, but for the development of sound artistic
taste and the enriching and spiritualizing of life by seeking to
surround it at all times with the true and the beautiful, and with the
old-time virtues of purity, manliness, and courage.

Among the "Beacon Lights" of the age there can be no question that
Ruskin is worthy of an exalted place, since few men of our modern time,
rich as it is in eminent thinkers and writers, has done more than he to
illumine the many subjects with which he has so fascinatingly