attaches to this species of self-murder, yet disgrace is not the only
thing we have to fear in the course of our brief pilgrimage. We emerge
from eternity, we plunge into eternity; we have but a brief space to
poise ourselves in the light ere we drop into the gulf of doom, and
our duty is to be miserly over every moment and every faculty that is
vouchsafed to us. The essentials of thought and knowledge are
contained in a very few books, and the most toilsome drudge who ever
preached a sermon, drove a rivet, or swept a floor may become
perfectly educated by exercising a wise self-restraint, by resolutely
refusing to be guided by the ambitious advice of airy cultured
persons, and by mastering a few good books to the last syllable. Mr.
Ruskin is one of our greatest masters of English, and his supremacy as
a thinker is sufficiently indicated by Mazzini's phrase--"Ruskin has
the most analytic mind in Europe." No truer word was ever spoken than
this last, for, in spite of his dogmatic disposition, Mr. Ruskin does
utter the very transcendencies of wisdom. Now this glorious writer of
English, this subtlest of thinkers, was rigidly kept to a very few
books until he reached manhood. Under the eye of his mother he went
six times through the Bible, and learned most of the Book by heart.
This in itself was a discipline of the most perfect kind, for the
translators of the Bible had command of the English tongue at the time
when it was at its noblest. Then Mr. Ruskin read Pope again and again,
thus unconsciously acquiring the art of expressing meaning with a
complete economy of words. In the evening he heard the Waverley Novels
read aloud until he knew the plot, the motive, the ultimate lesson of
all those beautiful books. When he was fourteen years old, he read one
or two second-rate novels over and over again; and even this was good
training, in that it showed him the faults to be avoided. Before his
boyhood was over, he read his Byron with minute attention, and once
more he was introduced to a master of expression. Byron is a little