expensive, at the Master's feet. The reminiscence is of very early childhood; and is all the more beautiful for its artless simple-heartedness. After describing the more general effect of some bold mountain scenery upon his young mind, he goes

"Although there was no definite religious sentiment mingled with it, there was a continual perception of sanctity in the whole of nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest; an instinctive awe mixed with delight; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit. I could only feel this perfectly when I was alone . . . when, after being some time away from the hills, I first got to the shore of a mountain river, where the brown water circled among the pebbles, or when I saw the first swell of distant land against the sunset, or the first low broken wall, covered with mountain moss. I cannot, in the least, describe the feeling: but I do not think this is my fault, nor that of the English language; for I am afraid no feeling is describable. If we had to explain even the sense of bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it, we should be hard put to it for words; and this joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of heart-hunger, satisfied with the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit. These feelings remained in their full intensity, till I was eighteen or twenty, and then, as the reflective and practical power increased, and the cares of this world' gained upon me, faded gradually away in the manner described by Wordsworth in his 'Intimations of Immortality.'" (Modern Painters, Vol. III. pp. 297, 298. American reprint.)

·

It is obvious that our author's religious feelings are the outflow of thoroughly fixed religious convictions; not the jeu d'esprit of a transient excited moral sensibility; nor a sombre cloak thrown over the gay-hearted worldling's shoulders that he may walk in this or that procession awhile more decorously, or sport for an hour a velvet-bound, gold-clasped ritual with sacramental gracefulness, under the inspirations of the organ-loft and "the dim religious light" of mullioned windows and groined arches. The second volume of his "Painters" reads almost like a book of theology. Earnest as Ruskin is in his art-protests and strictures, you can see that the depths of his impassioned nature are not stirred by these interests as a simply professional affair, but by the bearings of truth in art and nature upon truth in Christian science and practice. His eye is

that of a prophet continually looking beyond the thing next to him to the corresponding facts of the sphere of spiritual faith and worship. What he writes of his favorite Turner in art may be applied to himself in religious thoughtfulness:

"With him the hue is a beautiful auxiliary in working out the great impressions to be conveyed; but it is not the source nor the essence of that impression; it is little more than a visible melody, given to raise and assist the mind in the reception of nobler ideas -as sacred passages of sweet sounds, to prepare the feelings for the reading of the mysteries of God." (Vol. I. p. 170.)

And the loving counsel to that gifted artist, then living, with which he closed his opening volume, has been his own guide in expatiating through these fields of beauty:

"It is, therefore, that we pray him to utter nothing lightly to do nothing regardlessly. He stands upon an eminence, from which he looks back over the universe of God, and forward over the generations of men. Let every work of his hand be a history of the one, and a lesson to the other. Let each exertion of his mighty mind be both hymn and prophecy — adoration to the Deity—revelation to mankind." (Vol. I. pp. 421, 422.)

Mist and mystery- an English fog and the partial knowledge of truth with which we must be content; the analogy is natural, and the expansion of it characteristic:

"If we insist upon perfect intelligibility and complete declaration in every moral subject, we shall fall into misery of unbelief. Our whole happiness and power of energetic action depend upon our being able to breathe and live in the cloud; content to see it opening here and closing there; rejoicing to catch, through the thinnest films of it, glimpses of stable and substantial things; but yet, perceiving a nobleness even in the concealment, and rejoicing that the kindly veil is spread where the untempered light might have scorched us, or the infinite clearness wearied. And I believe that the resentment of this interference of the mist is one of the forms of proud error which are too easily mistaken for virtues. To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed unmanly, and therefore we think that to love light and seek knowledge, must always be right. Yet (as in all matters before observed) wherever pride has any share in the work, even knowledge and light may be ill-pursued. Knowledge is good, and light is good, yet man perished in seeking knowledge, and moths

perished in seeking light; and if we, who are crushed before the moth, will not accept such mystery as is needful for us, we shall perish in like manner. But, accepted in humbleness, it instantly becomes an element of pleasure; and I think that every rightly constituted mind ought to rejoice, not so much in knowing anything clearly, as in feeling that there is infinitely more which it cannot know. None but proud or weak men would mourn over this, for we may always know more if we choose, by working on; but the pleasure is, I think, to humble people, in knowing that the journey is endless, the treasure inexhaustible, watching the cloud still march before them with its summitless pillar, and being sure that, to the end of time, and the length of eternity, the mysteries of its infinity will still open farther and farther, their dimness being the sign and necessary adjunct of their inexhaustibleness. I know there are an evil mystery and a deathful dimness the mystery of the great Babylon the dimness of the sealed eye and soul; but do not let us confuse these with the glorious mystery of the things which the angels 'desire to look into,' or with the dimness which, even before the clear eye and open soul, still rests on sealed pages of the eternal volume." (Vol. IV. pp. 66, 67.)

The spirit of this author is exultantly chivalric. He belongs to the church militant against all outstanding evil; ay, like a true knight, challenges its assailment as an invigorating stimulus to virtue. He walks into the ring of adverse forces like a Greek athlete, with his eye fixed on the amaranth crown, and the joy of conquest already throbbing at his heart. Suffering, in some sort, is to him the necessary condition of strength. Out of the slain lion the bold, brave heart must gather the meat and the honey the nourishment and the sweetness. (Judges xiv. 14.) Rest may do for a coming world, but work and struggle are the life of this. He carries this idea to a quite startling assertion, and one which may suggest the query, whether a faith which gives a proper repose be not the very condition of the most effective working. Probably he would fully concede this, although seeming to question it. Commenting upon the Purists Orcagna, Perugino, and the earlier religious painters - he considers them too serenely persuaded of the merging of evil in good, and thus too much relieved of the sense of conflict against evil and of sorrow on account of it, to make themselves felt in the highest power of their art. The suggestion curiously reminds one of a remark attributed to

Martin Luther, that he could always pray the best when he felt slightly angry- of course at the devil and his works. We take it to be the sentiment (well enough in a sense) that everything is as it should be, but carried over into a paralyzing acquiescence in much which is not well enough in any sense, that comes in for this stricture:

"The absence of personal fear, the consciousness of security as great in the midst of pestilence and storm as amidst beds of flowers on a summer morning, and the certainty that whatever appeared evil, or was assuredly painful, must eventually issue in a far greater and enduring good-this general feeling and conviction, I say, would gradually lull, and at last put to entire rest, the physical sensations of grief and fear; so that the man would look upon danger without dread, expect pain without lamentation. It may, perhaps, be thought that this is a very high and right state of mind. Unfortunately, it appears that the attainment of it is never possible without inducing some form of intellectual weakness. . . . No literature exists of a high class produced by minds in the pure religious temper. [?] . . . The reason of this I believe to be, that the right faith of man is not intended to give him repose, but to enable him to do his work; ... that he should look stoutly into this world, in faith that if he does his work thoroughly here, some good to others or himself, with which, however, he is not at present concerned, will come of it hereafter. And this kind of brave but not very cheerful or hopeful faith, I perceive to be always rewarded by clear practical success and splendid intellectual power; while the faith which dwells on the future fades away into a rosy mist, and emptiness of musical air. That result, indeed, follows naturally enough on its habit of assuming that things must be right, or must come right, when probably the fact is, that so far as we are concerned, they are entirely wrong, and going wrong; and also on its weak and false way of looking on what these religious persons call "the bright side of things," that is to say, on one side of them only, when God has given them two sides, and intended us to see both." (Vol. V. pp. 217, 218.)

Yet taking things as they are and trying to make them better, we have the promise of eventual success to the grand contest of the right and the good against their antagonists :

"We cannot say how far it is right or agreeable with God's will, while men are perishing round about us, while grief, and pain, and wrath, and impiety, and death, and all the powers of the air, are

working wildly and evermore, and the cry of blood going up to heaven, that any of us should take hand from the plough; but this we know, that there will come a time when the service of God shall be the beholding of him; and though in these stormy seas, where we are now driven up and down, his Spirit is dimly seen on the face of the waters, and we are left to cast anchors out of the stern and wish for day, that day will come, when, with the evangelists on the crystal and stable sea, all the creatures of God shall be full of eyes within, and there shall be "no more curse, but his servants shall serve him, and shall see his face." (Vol. II. p. 138.)

"All the creatures of God: Festus restoration

but not the entireness of a

"Behold they come, the legions of the lost,
Transform'd already, by the bare behest
Of God, our Maker, to the purest form
Of seraph brightness."

Our author is careful to define his hopes; we italicize a single phrase:

"As the dead body shall be raised to life, so also the defeated soul to victory, if only it has been fighting on its Master's side; has made no covenant with Death; nor itself bowed its forehead for his seal. Blind from the prison-house, maimed from the battle, or mad from the tombs, their souls shall surely yet sit, astonished, at His feet who giveth peace. . . . When the time comes for us to wake out of the world's sleep, why should it be otherwise than out of the dreams of the night? Singing of birds, first, broken and low, as, not to dying eyes, but eyes that wake to life, the casement slowly grows a glimmering square;' and then the grey, and then the rose of dawn; and last the light, whose going forth is to the ends of heaven." (Vol. V. pp. 367-370.)

He quarrels good-naturedly with the painters who have missed the spiritual meaning of Italian beauty, and Swiss grandeur, surfeiting the public with "peaked caps and flat-headed pines," and making snow-drifts look like great white stones:

"but there is nevertheless a generic Alpine scenery, a fountain of feeling yet unopened a chord of harmony yet untouched by art. It will be struck by the first man who can separate what is national, in Switzerland, from what is ideal. We do not want chalets and three-legged stools, cow-bells and buttermilk. We want