Many people regard the style of Ruskin as his chief claim to
greatness. If the time ever come when men no longer study him for
sermons in stones, they will nevertheless turn to his pages to enjoy
one of the most gorgeous prose styles of the nineteenth century. For a
parallel to the sensuous beauties of Ruskin's essays on art, one turns
instinctively to poetry; and of all the poets Ruskin is perhaps likest
Keats. His sentences, like the poet's, are thick-set with jeweled
phrases; they are full of subtle harmonies that respond, like a
Stradivarius, to the player's every mood. In its ornateness Ruskin's
style is like his favorite cathedral of Amiens, in the large stately,
in detail exquisite, profuse, and not without a touch of the
grotesque. It is the style of an artist.

[Sidenote: Ruskin's method of construction in description.]

A critical fancy may even discover in the construction of his finest
descriptions a method not unlike that of a painter at work upon his
canvas. He blocks them out in large masses, then sketches and colors
rapidly for general effects, treating detail at first more or less
vaguely and collectively, but passing in the end to the elaboration of
detail in the concrete, touching the whole with an imaginative gleam
that lends a momentary semblance of life to the thing described, after
the manner of the "pathetic fallacy." Thus it is in the famous
description of St. Mark's:[11] we are given first the largest general
impression, the "long, low pyramid of coloured light," which the
artist proceeds to "hollow beneath into five great vaulted porches,"
whence he leads the eye slowly upwards amidst a mass of bewildering
detail--"a confusion of delight"--from which there slowly emerge those
concrete details with which the author particularly wishes to impress
us, "the breasts of the Greek horses blazing in their breadth of