Book . ^ 3 
 
 Ccpi§htl>l" 
 
 COPmiGHI DEPOSIT. 
 

 JOHN RUSKIN. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK 
 
 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 FOR EVERY DAY IN THE YEAR 
 
 COMPILED AND BDITBD BY 
 
 ANN BACHELOR 
 
 AUTHOR OF "CARLYLE YEAR-BOOK." 
 
 1/>i 
 
 He teaches that all beauty, all art, all work, and all life, are holy 
 things ; that through them God manifests Himseli to mao, and 
 man draws near to God. — Vida Scudp^h. 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 JAMES H. EARLE & COMPANY 
 
 178 Washington Street 
 
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 CONO' L-b 
 Two Copies RacefV*^ 
 
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 CLASS CC XXc, No, 
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 Copyright, 1901, 
 By JAMES H. EARLE & COMPANY. 
 
 All Rights Reserved. 
 
I- 
 
 ) 
 
 TO 
 
 /»^ IbusbanO 
 
 THIS BOOK 
 IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED. 
 
The strange New Year that knocketh at our 
 gate 
 Has yet to learn our needs- 
 Has yet to seize the clew. Its barred path, 
 
 Who knoweth where it leads ? 
 We only know that One whose steps err not 
 
 Is guide. He goes before : 
 *'I will not leave you "—this His given 
 word — 
 " Nor fail you evermore." 
 
 — M. K. A. Stone. 
 
 Every day is a fresh beginning, 
 
 Every morn is the world made new. 
 
 You who are weary of sorrow and sinning 
 Here is a beautiful hope for you : 
 A hope for me and a hope for you. 
 
 —Susan Coowdge. 
 
RtJSKIN YEAR-BOOIC. 
 
 January i. 
 
 To-DAY, unsullied, comes to thee, new-born ; 
 
 To-morrow is not thine ; 
 
 The sun may cease to shine 
 For thee, ere earth shall greet its morn. 
 
 Be earnest, then, in thought and deed. 
 
 Nor fear approaching night ; 
 
 Calm comes with evening light, 
 And hope and peace. Thy duty heed to-day. 
 
 January 2. 
 
 We may have but a few thousands of days 
 to spend, perhaps hundreds only, perhaps 
 tens ; nay, the longest of our time and best, 
 looked back on, will be but a moment ; we 
 are living spirits, not passing clouds. He 
 maketh the winds His messengers, the mo- 
 mentary fire, His minister. And shall we 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 do less than these? Let us do the work of 
 men while we bear the form of them. 
 
 — Sesame and Liues. 
 
 January 3. 
 Take your Latin dictionary, and look out 
 " soUennis," and fix the sense of the word well 
 in your mind, and remember that every day 
 of your early life is ordaining irrevocably, for 
 good or evil, the custom and practise of your 
 soul ; ordaining either sacred customs of dear 
 and lovely recurrence, or trenching deeper and 
 deeper the furrows for seed of sorrow. Now, 
 therefore, see that no day passes in which 
 you do not make yourself a somewhat better 
 creature ; and in order to do that, find out 
 first what you are now. Do not think 
 vaguely about it, take pen and paper, and 
 write down as accurate a description of your- 
 self as you can, with the date to it. If you 
 dare not do so, find out why you dare not, 
 and try to get strength of heart enough to 
 look yourself fairly in the face, in mind as 
 well as body. I do not doubt but that the 
 
8 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 mind is a less pleasant thing to look at than 
 the face, and for that very reason, it needs 
 more looking at ; so always have two mirrors 
 on your toilet table, and see that with proper 
 care you dress body and mind before them 
 daily. After the dressing is done for that 
 day, think no more about it. 
 
 — Sesame and I^iwes. 
 
 January 4. 
 The whole period of youth is one essen- 
 tially of formation, edification, instruction — 
 there is not an hour of it but is trembling 
 with destinies, not a moment of which, once 
 passed, the appointed work can ever be done 
 again, or the neglected blow struck on the 
 cold iron. —Modern Painters. 
 
 January 5. 
 God is a kind Father. He chooses work 
 for every creature which will be delightful 
 to them, if they do it simply and humbly. 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 January 6. 
 Education is leading human souls to 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-JBOOk. 
 
 what is best, and making what is best of 
 them. The training which makes men hap- 
 piest in themselves also makes them most 
 serviceable to others. 
 
 —The Stones oe Venice. 
 
 January 7. 
 In all things that we see, or do, we are to 
 desire perfection, and strive for it ; we are, 
 nevertheless, not to set the meaner thing, in 
 its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler 
 thing, in its mighty progress ; not to esteem 
 smooth minuteness above shattered majesty ; 
 not to prefer mean victory to honorable de- 
 feat ; not to lower the level of an aim, that 
 we may the more surely enjoy the compla- 
 cency of success. But, above all, in our deal- 
 ings with the souls of other men, we are to 
 take care how we check, by some requirement 
 or narrow caution, efforts which might other- 
 wise lead to a nobler issue ; and, still more, 
 how we withhold an admiration from great 
 excellences, because they are mingled with 
 
 rough faults. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
lo RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 January 8. 
 
 The snow, the vapor, and the stormy 
 wind, fulfil His word ; are our acts and 
 thoughts lighter and milder than these, that 
 we should forget it ? 
 
 January 9. 
 
 Obedience is the crowning grace, as it is 
 that principle to which Polity owes its sta- 
 bility. Life its happiness, Faith its acceptance, 
 Creation its continuance. Exactly in pro- 
 portion to the majesty of things in the scale 
 of being is the completeness of their obedi- 
 ence to the laws that are set over them. 
 
 —The Seven Lamps of Arcihtecture. 
 
 January 10. 
 
 Men often look to bring about great re- 
 sults by violent and unprepared effort. But 
 it is only in fair and forecast order, " as the 
 earth bringeth forth herbud," that righteous- 
 ness and praise may spring forth before the 
 
 nation. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
kUSKlP7 YEAR-BOOK. ii 
 
 January ii. 
 All one's life is music \i one touches the 
 notes rightly and in time. 
 
 —Ethics of thk Dust. 
 
 January 12. 
 There is religion in everything around 
 us ; a calm and holy religion in the unbreath- 
 ing things of nature which man would do 
 well to imitate. It is a meek and blessed 
 influence stealing in, as it were, unawares 
 upon the heart ; it comes quietly and with- 
 out excitement ; it does not rouse up the 
 passions ; it is untrammeled by the creeds, 
 and unshadowed by the superstitions of 
 man ; it is fresh from the hands of its author, 
 glowing from the immediate presence of the 
 great Spirit which pervades and quickens it ; 
 it is written on the arched sky ; it looks out 
 from every star; it is on the sailing-cloud 
 and in the invisible wind ; it is among the 
 hills and valleys of the earth, where the 
 shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin at- 
 mosphere of eternal winter, or where the 
 mighty forest fluctuates before the strong 
 
12 kVSkm YEAR-BOOk. 
 
 wind with its dark waves of green foliage ; 
 it is spread out like a legible language upon 
 the broad face of the unsleeping ocean ; it 
 is the poetry of nature ; it is this which up- 
 lifts the spirit within us until it is strong 
 enough to overlook the shadows of our place 
 of probation, which breaks, link after link, 
 the chain that binds us to materiality, and 
 which opens to our imagination a world of 
 spiritual beauty and holiness. 
 
 'January 13. 
 Wheresoever the search after truth be- 
 gins, there life begins; wheresoever that 
 search ceases, there life ceases. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 January 14. 
 God has lent us the earth for our life. It 
 is a great entail. It belongs to them who 
 are to come after us, and whose names are 
 already written in the book of creation, as 
 to us ; and we have no right, by anything 
 that we do or neglect, to involve them in un- 
 necessary penalties, or to deprive them of 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 13 
 
 benefits which it was in our power to be- 
 queath. 
 
 —The Seven Lamps oe Architecture. 
 
 January 15. 
 The first point we have all to determine 
 Is not how free we are, but what kind of 
 creatures we are. It is of small importance 
 to any of us whether we get liberty, but of 
 the greatest that we deserve it. Whether 
 we can win it, fate must determine; but 
 that we will be worthy of it we may our- 
 selves determine ; and the sorrowfullest fate 
 of all that we can suffer is to have it without 
 
 deserving it. 
 
 — The Queen oe the Air. 
 
 January 16. 
 
 The right faith of man is not intended to 
 
 give him repose, but to enable him to do 
 
 his work. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 January 17. 
 God alone can finish ; and the more intel- 
 ligent the human mind becomes, the more 
 
14 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 the infiniteness of interval is felt between 
 
 human and Divine work. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 January i8. 
 The entire object of true education is to 
 make people not merely do the right things, 
 but enjoy the right things ; not merely in- 
 dustrious, but to love industry ; not merely 
 learned, but to love knowledge ; not merely 
 pure, but to love purity ; not merely just, 
 but to hunger and thirst after justice. 
 
 —The Crown of Wii^d Oi<ive. 
 
 January 19. 
 "The work of men," — And what is that ? 
 Well, we may any of us know very quickly, 
 on the condition of being wholly ready to do 
 it. But many of us are for the most part 
 thinking, not of what we are to do, but of 
 what we are to get and the best of us are 
 sunk into the sin of Ananias, and it is a 
 mortal one, — we want to keep back part of 
 the price. And we continually talk of 
 taking up our cross, as if the only harm 
 in a cross was the weight of it, — as if it 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 IS 
 
 was only a thing to be carried, instead of 
 to be crucified upon. They that are His, have 
 crucified the flesh with the affections and 
 lusts. Does that mean, think you, that in 
 time of national distress, of religious trial, of 
 crisis for every interest and hope of humanity, 
 none of us will cease jesting, none cease 
 idling, none put themselves to any wholesome 
 work, none take so much as a tag of lace off 
 their footman's coat, to save the world ? Or 
 does it mean, that they are ready to leave 
 houses, lands, and kindreds, — yes, and life, if 
 need be ? Life ! — some of us are ready enough 
 to throw that away, joyless as we have made 
 it. But " station in life," — how many of us 
 are ready to quit that ? Is it not always the 
 great objection where there is a question of 
 finding something useful to do, " We can- 
 not leave our station in life ? " 
 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 January 20. 
 No man ever worked honestly without 
 giving some help to his race. 
 
 — MoD:eRN Paintj^rs, 
 
l6 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 January 21. 
 
 The thoroughly great men are those who 
 
 have done everything thoroughly, and who 
 
 have never despised anything, however small, 
 
 of God's making. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 January 22. 
 No one can ask honestly or hope fully to 
 be delivered from temptation unless he has 
 himself honestly and firmly determined to do 
 the best he can to keep out of it. 
 
 January 23. 
 
 Every day is a day of judgment, — every 
 day is a dies irce^ and writes its irrevocable 
 verdict in the flames of its nest. Think you 
 that judgment waits till the doors of the grave 
 open ? It waits at the doors of your house : 
 it waits at the corners of your streets. We 
 are in the midst of judgments : the insects 
 that we crush are our judges, the moments 
 we fret away are our judges, the elements 
 that feed us judge us as they indulge. Let us, 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 17 
 
 for our lives, do the work of men while we 
 bear the form of them, if indeed those lives 
 are not as a vapor, and do not vanish away. 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 January 24. 
 
 Alas ! — unless we perform Divine service. 
 
 in every willing act of our lives, we never 
 
 perform it at all. 
 
 — The Crown of Wii,d Oi^ive. 
 
 January 25. 
 In the knowledge of ourselves we shall 
 gain that self-dependent power which is the 
 secret of true work, and that self-conscious 
 weakness which is the secret of true strength. 
 January 26. 
 Every human action gains in honor, in 
 grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard 
 to things that are to come. It is the far sight, 
 the quiet and confident patience that, above 
 all other attributes, separates man from man, 
 and nears him to his Maker ; and there is no 
 action nor act, whose majesty we may not 
 measure by this test. 
 
 —The Seven Lamps op Architecture. 
 2 
 
l8 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 January 27. 
 
 Every duty we omit obscures some truth 
 we should have known. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 January 28. 
 
 Make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. 
 None of us yet know, for none of us have 
 been taught in early youth, what fairy pal- 
 aces we may build of beautiful thought — 
 proof against all adversity. Bright fancies, 
 satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful 
 sayings, treasure-house of precious and rest- 
 ful thoughts, which care cannot disturb, nor 
 pain make gloomy, nor poverty take away 
 from us — houses built without hands, for our 
 souls to live in. 
 
 January 29. 
 
 Obedience is, indeed, founded in a kind 
 of freedom, else it would become mere sub- 
 jugation, but that freedom is only granted 
 that obedience may be more perfect ; and 
 thus, while a measure of license is necessary 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 19 
 
 to exhibit the individual energies of things, 
 the fairness and pleasantness and perfection 
 of them all consist in their restraint. 
 
 —The Seven Lamps oe Architecture. 
 
 January 30. 
 The increase of knowledge, merely as such, 
 does not make the soul larger or smaller ; 
 in the sight of God, all the knowledge man 
 can gain is as nothing ; but the soul, for 
 which the great scheme of redemption was 
 laid, be it ignorant or be it wise, is all in all ; 
 and in the activity, strength, health, and 
 well-being of this soul, lies the main differ- 
 ence, in His sight, between one man and 
 another. 
 
 —The Stones oe Venice. 
 
 January 31. 
 To the lamb of the desert, the sweetest 
 thought is that of the fold. 
 
 The Love of God exists, and you may see 
 it, and live in it, if you will. 
 
 —Lectures on Art. 
 
There's not a glimmer of sun in the sullen 
 sky, 
 Where the mountainous clouds drive on 
 
 as the day declines, 
 And the wind, like a beast at bay that 
 roars and whines. 
 To the riotous waves of the ocean makes 
 reply. 
 
 The snowflakes flutter and whirl through the 
 icy air, 
 The rustling leaves to the spectral oak 
 
 boughs cling, 
 The fields that will bourgeon and break, 
 'neath the breath of spring 
 Into billows of bloom, are shrivelled, and 
 wan and bare. 
 
 30 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 21 
 
 The hills are white, and the river makes no 
 sound ; 
 Not a song upwells from the wood, and 
 
 the eaves are dumb ; 
 While the hardy sparrow, in search of a 
 scanty crumb. 
 Hops about o'er the treacherous frozen 
 ground. 
 
 — CWNTON SCOI^I^ARD. 
 
22 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 February i.. 
 The passions of mankind are partly pro- 
 tective, partly beneficent, like the chaff 
 and grain of the corn, but none without 
 their use, none without nobleness when 
 seen in balanced unity with the rest of 
 the spirit they are charged to defend. 
 The passions of which the end is the contin- 
 uance of the race, the indignation which is 
 to arm it against injustice or strengthen it 
 to resist wanton injury, and the fear which 
 lies at the root of prudence, reverence, and 
 awe, are all honorable and beautiful so long 
 as man is regarded in his relations to the 
 
 existing world. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 February 2. 
 Every right action, and true thought sets 
 the seal of its beauty on person and face. 
 
 — MUNERE PUI<VERIS. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 23 
 
 February 3. 
 
 * * * All kinds of precious grace and 
 teaching being united in this h'nk between 
 the earth and man : wonderful in universal 
 adaptation to his need, desire, and disci- 
 pline : God's daily preparation of the earth 
 for him, with beautiful means of life. First, 
 a carpet to make it soft for him ; then, a 
 colored fantasy of embroidery thereon ; then, 
 tall-spreading foliage to shade him from sun- 
 heat, and shade also the fallen rain, that it 
 may not dry quickly back into the clouds, 
 but stay to nourish the springs among the 
 moss. Stout wood to bear this leafage ; 
 easily to be cut, yet tough and light, to 
 make houses for him, or instruments (lance- 
 shaft, or plow-handle, according to his tem- 
 per) ; useless it had been, if harder; useless, 
 if less fibrous ; useless, if less elastic. Win- 
 ter comes, and the shade of leafage falls 
 away, to let the sun warm the earth ; the 
 strong boughs remain, breaking the strength 
 of winter winds. The seeds which are to 
 prolong the race, innumerable according to 
 
24 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 the need, are made beautiful and palatable, 
 varied into infinitude of appeal to the fancy 
 of man, or provision for his service : cold 
 juice or glowing spice, or balm, or incense, 
 softening oil, preserving resin, medicine of 
 styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm ; and all 
 these presented in forms of endless change. 
 Fragility or force, softness and strength, in 
 all degrees and aspects; unerring uprightness, 
 as of temple pillars, or undivided wandering 
 of feeble tendrils on the ground ; mighty re- 
 sistances of rigid arm and limb to the storms 
 of ages, or wavings to and fro with faintest 
 pulse, of summer streamlet ; roots cleaving 
 the strength of rock, or binding the transi- 
 ence of the sand ; crests basking in sunshine 
 of the desert, or hiding by dripping spring 
 and lightless cave ; foliage far tossing in en- 
 tangled fields beneath every wave of ocean 
 — clothing with variegated, everlasting films, 
 the peaks of the trackless mountains, or min- 
 istering at cottage doors to every gentlest 
 passion and simplest joy of humanity. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 February 4. 
 Mighty of heart, mighty of mind, mag- 
 nanimous, — to be this is indeed to be great in 
 life ; to become this increasingly is, indeed, 
 to advance in life, — in life itself, not in the 
 
 trappings of it. 
 
 — Sesame and lyiwES. 
 
 February 5. 
 We usually believe in immortality, so far 
 as to avoid preparation for anything after 
 death. Whereas, a wise man will at least 
 hold himself prepared for one or other of 
 two events, of which one or other is inevi- 
 table ; and will have all things in order, for 
 his sleep, or in readiness, for his awakening. 
 —The Crown of Wii,d Oi<ive. 
 
 February 6. 
 For all education begins in work. What 
 we think, or what we know, or what we be- 
 lieve, is in the end of little consequence. 
 The only thing of consequence is what we do : 
 and for man, woman or child, the first point 
 of education is to make them do their best. 
 — ^The Crown of W11.D Ouve. 
 
26 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 February 7. 
 All real joy and power of progress in 
 humanity depend on finding something to 
 reverence, and all the baseness and misery 
 of humanity begin in a habit of disdain. 
 — The Crown of Wii,d Oi,ive. 
 
 February 8. 
 No nation ever made its bread by its great 
 arts, or its great wisdoms. By its minor arts 
 or manufactures, by its practical knowledges, 
 yes ; but its noble scholarship, its noble phil- 
 osophy, and its noble art, are always to be 
 bought as a treasure, not sold for a liveli- 
 hood. You do not learn that you may live 
 — you live that you may learn. 
 
 — The Crown of \Vii.d Oi,ive. 
 
 February 9. 
 A TRUE wife, in her husband's house, is his 
 servant ; it is in his heart that she is queen. 
 Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is 
 her part to be ; whatever of highest he can 
 hope, it is hers to promise ; all that is dark 
 in him she must purge into purity ; all that 
 
RUSKTN YEAR-BOOK. 27 
 
 is failing in him she must strengthen into 
 truth : in her, through all the world's warfare, 
 he must find his peace. 
 
 — The Crown of W11.D OwvE. 
 
 February 10. 
 Out of suffering comes the serious mind ; 
 out of salvation, the grateful heart ; out of 
 endurance,fortitude ; out of deliverance, faith. 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 February ii. 
 Language is only dear when sympathetic. 
 — Lectures on Art. 
 
 February 12. 
 
 Our God is a household God, as well as a 
 heavenly one ; He has an altar in every 
 man's dwelling ; let men look to it when they 
 rend it lightly and pour out its ashes. 
 
 —The Seven Lamps oe Architecture. 
 
 February 13. 
 Will you go and gossip with your house- 
 maid and stable-boy when you may talk 
 with queens and kings ? But we cannot read 
 
28 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 unless our minds are fit. Avarice, injustice, 
 vulgarity, base excitement, all unfit us. Be- 
 ware of reading in order to say, thus Milton 
 thought, rather than, thus I thought in mis- 
 reading Milton. 
 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 February 14. 
 
 All great song, from the first day when 
 
 human lips contrived syllables, has been 
 
 sincere song. 
 
 —The Queen oe the Air. 
 
 February 15. 
 Every true light of science, every merci- 
 fully-granted power, every wisely-restricted 
 thought, teach us more clearly day by day, 
 that in the heavens above, and the earth be- 
 neath, there is one continual and omnipotent 
 presence of help, and of peace, for all men 
 who know that they live, and remember that 
 
 they die. 
 
 — The Queen of the Air. 
 
 February 16. 
 Doing is the great thing. For if, reso- 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 29 
 
 lutely, people do what is right, in time they 
 come to like doing it. 
 
 —The Crown of Wii,d Oi<iv«. 
 
 February 17. 
 What you choose to grasp with your 
 mind is the question ; much more serious 
 than how you handle it afterwards. What 
 does it matter how you build, if you have 
 bad bricks to build with ? how you reason, 
 if the ideas with which you begin are foul 
 or false? And in general all fatal reasoning 
 proceeds from peoples having some one false 
 notion in their hearts with which they are 
 resolved their reasoning shall comply. 
 
 February 18, 
 Let every dawn of morning be to you as 
 the beginning of life, and every setting sun 
 be to you as its close. Then let every one 
 of these short lives leave its sure record of 
 some kindly thing done for others — some 
 goodly strength of knowledge gained for 
 yourselves. 
 
 — I^KCTURES ON Art. 
 
30 RUSK IN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 February 19. 
 Our whole happiness and power of ener- 
 getic action depend upon our being able to 
 breathe and live in the cloud ; content to 
 see its opening here and closing there ; re- 
 joicing 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. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 February 20. 
 People will go anywhere barefoot to 
 preach their faith, but must be well bribed 
 to practise it. 
 
 There is no true potency, remember, but 
 
 that of help ; nor true ambition, but ambition 
 
 to serve. 
 
 —The Crown of Wii^d Oi,ive. 
 
 February 21. 
 Have you ever thought seriously of the 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 31 
 
 meaning of the blessing given to the peace- 
 makers? People are always expecting to 
 get peace in heaven; but you know whatever 
 peace they get there will be ready-made. 
 Whatever making of peace they can be blest 
 for, must be on the earth here ; not the tak- 
 ing of arms against, but the building of nests 
 amidst its " sea of troubles " [like the hal- 
 cyon]. Difficult enough, you think? Per- 
 haps so, but I do not see any of you try. 
 We complain of the want of many things ; 
 we want votes, we want liberty, we want 
 amusements, we want money. Which of us 
 feels or knows that he wants peace ? 
 
 February 22. 
 How patiently God waits to teach us ! 
 How long He waits for us to learn the 
 lesson ! 
 
 February 23. 
 
 If you want any knowledge, you must 
 toil for it ; if food, you must toil for it ; and 
 
32 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 if pleasure, you must toil for it. Toil is the 
 law. Pleasure comes through toil, and not 
 by self-indulgence and indolence. When 
 one gets to love work, his life is a happy one. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 February 24. 
 However good you may be, you have 
 faults ; however dull you may be, you can 
 find out what some of them are ; and, how- 
 ever slight they may be, you had better 
 make some efforts to get quit of them. 
 
 — Sesame and LiweS. 
 
 February 25. 
 The more powerful the intellect, the less 
 will its works resemble those of other men. 
 
 There are many religions, but only one 
 
 morality. 
 
 — IvECTuRES ON Art. 
 
 February 26. 
 The moment we can use our possessions 
 to any good purpose ourselves, the instinct 
 of communicating that use to others rises 
 
RUSK IN YEAR-BOOK. 33 
 
 side by side with our power. If you can 
 read a book rightly, you will want others to 
 hear it ; if you can enjoy a picture rightly, 
 you will want others to see it. Learn how 
 to manage a horse, a plow, or a ship, and 
 you will desire to make your subordinates 
 good horsemen, or sailors ; you will never 
 be able to see the fine instrument you are 
 master of abused ; but, once fix your desire 
 on anything useless, and all the purest pride 
 and folly in your heart will mix with the 
 desire, and make you at last wholly in- 
 human, a mere ugly lump of stomach and 
 
 suckers, like a cuttle-fish. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 February 27. 
 Surely, nobody can always know what 
 is right, yes, you always can for to-day ; and 
 if you do what you see of it to-day you will 
 see more of it and more clearly to-morrow. 
 — Ethics of thf Dust. 
 
 February 28. 
 The true strength of every human soul is 
 3 
 
54 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 to be dependent in as many nobler as it can 
 discern, and to be depended upon by as 
 many inferior as it can reach. 
 
/iDarcb* 
 
 Ah March ! we know thou art kind-hearted, 
 
 spite of ugly looks and threats, 
 And out of sight, art nursing April's violets! 
 — HeIvEn Hunt Jackson. 
 
 Who said that March was a scold and a 
 
 shrew ? 
 Who said she had nothing on earth to do 
 But tempests and furies and rages to brew? 
 Why, look at the wealth she has lavished on 
 
 you ! 
 
 O March that blusters, and March that blows 
 
 What color under your footsteps glows ! 
 
 Beauty you summon from Winter snows, 
 
 And you are the pathway that leads to the 
 
 rose. 
 
 — Cewa Thaxter. 
 
 35 
 
36 KUSKIN YEAR-BOOIC. 
 
 March i. 
 Nothing that lives is, or can be, ideally 
 perfect ; part of it is decaying, part nascent, 
 the foxglove blossom, — a third part past, a 
 third part in full bloom, — is a type of the 
 life of this world. And in all things that 
 live there are certain irregularities and de- 
 ficiencies which are not only signs of life, 
 but sources of beauty. No human face is 
 exactly the same in its lines on each side, no 
 leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its 
 symmetry. All admit irregularity as they 
 imply change ; and to banish imperfection 
 is to destroy expression, to check exertion, 
 to paralyze vitality. All things are literally 
 better, holier, and more beloved for the im- 
 perfections which have been divinely ap- 
 pointed, that the laws of human life may be 
 Effort, and the laws of human judgment 
 
 Mercy. 
 
 The Stones oe Venice. 
 
KVSKIN VEAR-BOOJIC, 37 
 
 March 2. 
 
 Wherever you go, whatever you do, act 
 more ior preservatioft and less ior production. 
 I assure you, the world is generally speaking, 
 in calamitous disorder, and just because you 
 have managed to thrust some lumber aside, 
 and get an available corner for yourselves, 
 you think you should do nothing but sit 
 spinning in it all day long — while, as house- 
 holders and economists, your first thought 
 and effort should be to set things more 
 square about you. Try to set the floors in 
 order, and get the rottenness out of your 
 granaries. Then sit and spin, but not till 
 then. 
 
 — Poi^iTicAi, Economy of Art. 
 
 March 3. 
 
 The finer the nature, the more flaws it 
 
 will show through the clearness of it ; and 
 
 it is a law of the universe, that the best 
 
 things shall be seldomest seen in their best 
 
 form. 
 
 —The Stones oe Venice. 
 
38 kUSKIN YEAR-BOOJt. 
 
 March 4. 
 Without seeking, truth cannot be known 
 at all. Truth must be ground for every man 
 by himself out of its husk, with such help as 
 he can get, indeed, but not without stern 
 labor of his own. 
 
 March 5. 
 
 God gives us always strength enough and 
 sense enough for what He wants us to do ; 
 if we either tire ourselves or puzzle ourselves, 
 it is our own fault. And we may always be 
 sure, whatever we are doing, that we cannot 
 be pleasing Him if we are not happy our- 
 selves. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 March 6. 
 
 You will find it less easy to uproot faults 
 than to choke them by gaining virtues. Do 
 not think of your faults ; still less of others' 
 faults. In every person who comes near 
 you look for what is good and strong; 
 honor that, rejoice in it, as you can, try to 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 39 
 
 imitate it, and your faults will drop off, like 
 dead leaves, when their time comes. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 March 7. 
 One sentence from Tennyson, quoted to 
 me by a friend, helps me very much when I 
 have anything particularly distasteful to do : 
 "As one for whom Christ died." I say it 
 over to myself, and the feeling gives place to 
 a great pity and a great longing to do some- 
 thing for the souls and bodies of the sin- 
 sick, ignorant sisters whom the great Elder 
 Brother considered worth suffering and dying 
 for. 
 
 March 8. 
 If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't 
 pray for it ; but if you do, you must do more 
 than pray ; you must work. 
 
 —The Crown of Wii,d Olive. 
 
 March 9. 
 My friends, do you remember that old 
 Scythian custom when the head of a house 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOfC, 
 
 died, — how he was dressed in his finest dress, 
 and set in his chariot, and carried about to 
 his friends' houses ; and each of them placed 
 him at his table's head, and all feasted in his 
 presence? Suppose it were offered to you, 
 in plain words, as it is offered to you in dire 
 facts, that you should gain this Scythian 
 honor, gradually, while you yet thought 
 yourself alive. . . . Every man accepts it 
 who desires to advance in life without know- 
 ing what life is ; who means only that he is 
 to get more horses, and more footmen, and 
 more fortune, and more public honor, and 
 not mce personal soul. 
 
 — Sesame and Lii^ies. 
 
 March io. 
 
 Conceit may puff a man up, but never 
 prop him up. 
 
 — Pre-Raphaelitism. 
 
 March ii. 
 
 The gentleman's first characteristic is 
 that fineness of structure in the body which 
 
USKIN YEAR-BOOK, 41 
 
 renders it capable of the most delicate sen- 
 sation, and of structure in the mind which 
 renders it capable of the most delicate sym- 
 pathies — one may say, simply, *' fineness of 
 nature." Heroic strength is not conceivable 
 without such delicacy. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 March 12. 
 A TREMULOUS crystal, waved as water, 
 poured out upon the ground, is your own 
 soul ; you may defile it, despise it, at your 
 pleasure, and at your peril ; for on the peace 
 of those weak waves must all the heaven you 
 shall ever gain be first seen ; and through such 
 purity as you can win for those dark waves 
 must all the light of the risen Sun of Right- 
 eousness be bent down by faint refraction. 
 Cleanse them and calm them, as you love 
 your life. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 March 13. 
 The first piece of good work a man has 
 to do is to find rest for himself, a place for 
 
41 liVSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 the sole of his foot ; his house or piece of 
 Holy land ; and make it so holy and happy 
 that if by chance he receives orders to leave 
 it there may be bitter pain in obedience. 
 
 March 14. 
 
 The mountain lies in the morning light 
 
 like a level vapor ; its gentle lines of ascent 
 
 are scarcely felt by the eye; it rises without 
 
 effort or exertion, by the mightiness of its 
 
 mass; every slope is full of slumber, and we 
 
 know not how it has been exalted until we 
 
 find it laid as a floor for the walking of the 
 
 eastern clouds. 
 
 — Modern Paintkrs. 
 
 March 15. 
 
 All rich people are not idle. There are 
 the idle rich and the idle poor, as there are the 
 busy rich and the busy poor. Many a beg- 
 gar is as lazy as if he had ten thousand a 
 year ; many a man of fortune is busier than 
 his errand boy. 
 
 — The Crown of Wii^d Olive. 
 
kUSKIN YEAR-BOOK'. 43 
 
 March 16. 
 
 Greatness can only be rightly estimated 
 when minuteness is justly reverenced. Great- 
 ness is the aggregation of minuteness ; nor 
 can its sublimity be felt truthfully by any 
 mind unaccustomed to the affectionate 
 watching of what is least. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 March 17. 
 
 Great art is the expression of the mind 
 of a great man, and mean art that of the 
 want of mind of a weak man. 
 
 —The Queen of the Air. 
 
 March 18. 
 
 The things to be desired for man in a 
 healthy state are that he should not see 
 dreams, but realities ; that he should not de- 
 stroy life, but save it ; and that he should 
 not be rich, but content. 
 
 March 19. 
 The refusal or reserve of a mighty painter 
 
44 RVSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 cannot be imitated. It is only by reaching 
 the same intellectual strength that you will 
 be able to give an equal dignity to your 
 self-denial. No one can tell you beforehand 
 what to accept, or what to ignore ; only re- 
 member always, in painting as in eloquence, 
 the greater your strength, the greater will 
 be your manner, and the fewer your words ; 
 and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of 
 life, the secret of high success will be found, 
 not in a fretful and various excellence, but 
 in a quiet singleness of justly-chosen aim. 
 — MoDKRN Painters. 
 
 March 20. 
 
 Without the resolution in your hearts 
 to do good work, so long as your right hands 
 have motion in them, and to do it whether 
 the issue be that you die or live, no life 
 worthy the name will ever be possible to 
 you, while, in once forming the resolution 
 that your work is to be well done, life is 
 really won, here and forever. 
 
 —Time and Tide. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 45 
 
 March 21. 
 
 Cheerfulness is just as natural to the 
 heart of a man in strong health as color to 
 his cheek ; and whenever there is habitual 
 gloom, there must be either bad air, un- 
 wholesome food, improperly severe labor, or 
 erring habits of life. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 March 22. 
 
 The playful fancy of a moment may in- 
 nocently be expressed by the passing word ; 
 but he can hardly have learned the precious- 
 ness of life, who passes days in the elabora- 
 tion of a jest. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 March 23. 
 
 He only is advancing in life, whose heart 
 is getting softer, whose bxood warmer, whose 
 brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into 
 living peace. 
 
 — Sesame and lyii,iES. 
 
46 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 March 24. 
 
 There is none of the furniture of a man's 
 mind which he has a right to exult in, but 
 that which he has hewn and furnished for 
 himself. He who has built himself a hut on 
 a desert heath, and carved his bed, and 
 tables, and chair out of the nearest forest, 
 may have some right to take pride in the 
 appliances of his narrow chamber, as assur- 
 edly he will have joy in them. But the 
 man who has had a palace built, and adorned, 
 and furnished for him, may, indeed, have 
 many advantages above the other, but he 
 has no reason to be proud of his upholster- 
 er's skill ; and it is ten to one if he has half 
 the joy in his couches of ivory that the other 
 will have in his pallet of pine. 
 
 — The Stones of Venice. 
 
 March 25. 
 
 No one ever gets wiser by doing wrong, 
 
 nor stronger. You will get wiser and 
 
 stronger only by doing right, whether forced 
 
 or not ; the prime, the one need is to do 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 47 
 
 that^ under whatever compulsion, until you 
 can do it without compulsion. And then 
 you are a man. 
 
 —The Queen of the Air. 
 
 March 26. 
 
 Men who know their place can take it 
 and keep it, be it low or high, contentedly 
 and firmly, neither yielding nor grasping; 
 and the harmony of hand and thought fol- 
 lows, rendering all great deeds of art pos- 
 sible — deeds in which the souls of men meet 
 like jewels in the windows of Aladdin's pal- 
 ace, the little gems and the large all equally 
 pure, needing no cement but fitting of facets ; 
 while the associative work of immodest men 
 is all jointless, and astir with warm ambi- 
 tion ; putridly dissolute, and forever on the 
 crawl. 
 
 —The Queen of the Air. 
 
 March 27. 
 Be in your heart a Sister of Charity al- 
 
48 RUSKIN- YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 ways, without either veiled or valuable dec- 
 laration of it. 
 
 —Sesame and lyiuES. 
 
 March 28. 
 
 Write the Commandments on the church 
 walls where they may be plainly seen, but 
 do not put a dash and a tail to every letter, 
 and remember that you are an architect, 
 not a writing master. 
 
 —The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 
 
 March 29. 
 When the men are true and good, and 
 stand shoulder to shoulder, the strength of 
 any nation is in its quantity of life, not in 
 its land nor gold. 
 
 —The Queen of the Air. 
 
 March 30. 
 
 Neither days, nor lives, can be made 
 holy by doing nothing in them, the best 
 prayer at the beginning of a day is that we 
 may not lose its moments ; and the best 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 49 
 
 grace before meat, the consciousness that we 
 have justly earned our dinner. 
 
 —The Crown of Wii,d Owve. 
 
 March 31. 
 Nobody does anything well that they 
 cannot help doing ; work is only done well 
 when it is done with a will ; and no man has 
 a thoroughly sound will unless he knows he 
 is doing what he should, and is in his place. 
 —The; Crown of Wild Oi^ive. 
 
 4 
 
HpriL 
 
 *TlS April, and the willow leans to look 
 
 And see within the brook 
 
 Its fair, new garniture of palest green ; 
 
 'Tis April, and the maple-buds are red, 
 
 While in the elms o'erhead 
 
 The leaf-elves have begun to weave a screen 
 
 That will in June-time throw 
 
 A wavering shadow on the lawn below ; 
 
 'Tis April, and a thousand ice-freed rills 
 
 Furrow a thousand hills ; 
 
 The wheat has pierced the loam, 
 
 And where the orchards soon the pinky foam 
 
 Of blossom-seas will toss. 
 
 The spiders fling their filmy webs across. 
 
 There is a throb in every river reed ; 
 A subtile essence in each wayside weed 
 Quickens its dormant root, 
 And bids it upward toward the sunlight 
 shoot ; 
 50 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 5^ 
 
 The trillium knows 
 
 That southern slopes no longer harbor 
 snows ; 
 
 The armored snail 
 
 On dry, dead grasses leaves a shining trail ; 
 
 The robber rooks out-caw their mawkish 
 strains 
 
 Above corn-planted plains ; 
 
 The winds are winds of promise, on whose 
 wings 
 
 Come countless breathings, endless whisper- 
 ings 
 
 Of bursting beauty in all germinant things. 
 
 — C1.INTON SCOI,I.ARD. 
 
52 RUSKIM YEAR-BOOfC. 
 
 April i. 
 Most of us do not need fine scenery ; the 
 precipice and the mountain peak are not 
 intended to be seen by all men, — perhaps 
 their power is greatest over those who are 
 unaccustomed to them. But trees, and fields, 
 and flowers were made for all, and are neces- 
 sary for all. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 April 2, 
 God has chosen the labor which is essen- 
 tial to the bodily sustenance with the pleas- 
 ures which are healthiest to the heart, and 
 while he made the ground stubborn, he made 
 its herbage fragrant, and its blossoms fair. 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 April 3. 
 That which we foolishly call vastness is, 
 rightly considered, not more wonderful, not 
 more impressive, than that which we inso- 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 53 
 
 lently call littleness, and the infinity of God 
 is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable, 
 not concealed, but incomprehensible ; it is a 
 clear infinity, the darkness of the pure un- 
 searchable sea. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 April 4. 
 People are perpetually squabbling about 
 what will be best to do, or easiest to do, or 
 advisablest to do, or profitablest to do; but 
 they never, so far as I hear them talk, ever 
 ask what is just to do. And it is the law of 
 heaven that you shall not be able to judge 
 what is wise or easy, unless you are first re- 
 solved to judge what is just, and to do it. 
 —The Crown of Wii^d O1.IVE. 
 
 April 5. 
 Do you ask to be the companions of 
 nobles ? Make yourself noble, and you shall 
 
 be. 
 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 April 6. 
 When men are rightly occupied, their 
 
54 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 amusement grows out of their work, as the 
 color-petals out of a fruitful flower, when 
 they are faithfully helpful and compassion- 
 ate, all their emotions become steady, deep, 
 perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the 
 natural pulse to the body. 
 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 April 7. 
 
 Wise work, is work with God. Foolish 
 work is work against God. And work done 
 with God, which He will help, may be briefly 
 described as *' Putting in Order " — that is, 
 enforcing God's law of order, spiritual and 
 material, over men and things. 
 
 — The Crown of Wild Olive. 
 
 April 8. 
 
 I BELIEVE that in periods of new efforts 
 and violent change, disappointment is a 
 wholesome medicine, and that in the secret 
 of it, as in the twilight so beloved by Titian, 
 we may see the colors of things with deeper 
 truth than in the most dazzling sunshine. 
 — Sesame and Lii^ies. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 55 
 
 April 9. 
 Education does not mean teaching the 
 people to know what they do not know ; it 
 means teaching them to behave as they do 
 not behave. —The Crown of Wii.d Ouve. 
 
 April 10. 
 What we like^ determines what we are^ 
 and is the sign of what we are ; and to teach 
 taste is inevitably to form character. 
 
 — The Crown of W11.D OwvE. 
 
 April ii. 
 Have faith that God *' made you upright," 
 though you have sought out many inven- 
 tions, so you will strive daily to become 
 more what your Maker meant and means you 
 to be, and daily gives you also the power to 
 be — and you will cling more and more to 
 the nobleness and virtue that is in you, say- 
 ing, " My righteousness I hold fast, and will 
 not let it go." 
 
 —The Crown of Wii,d Owve. 
 
 April 12. 
 
 Ships and armies you may replace if they 
 
56 RUSK-TN- YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 are lost, but a great intellect, once abused, 
 is a curse to the earth forever. 
 
 — Sesame and LiiyiES. 
 Everything has two sides, and God means 
 us to see both. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 April 13. 
 The more I think of it, the more I find 
 this conclusion impressed upon me, that the 
 greatest thing a human soul ever does in this 
 world is to see something and tell what it 
 saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people 
 can talk for one who can think, but thou- 
 sands can think for one who can see. To see 
 clearly, is poetry, prophesy, and religion, — 
 
 all in one. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 April 14. 
 Every person who tries to buy an article 
 for less than its proper value, or who tries to 
 sell it at more than its proper value — every 
 consumer who keeps a tradesman waiting for 
 his money, and every tradesman who bribes 
 a consumer to extravagance by credit, is 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 57 
 
 helping forward, according to his own meas- 
 ure of power, a system of baseless and dis- 
 honorable commerce, and forcing his country 
 down into poverty and shame. 
 
 — The Stones of Venice. 
 
 April 15. 
 
 To miscalculate our powers is to be mis- 
 guided and miserable in our occupation, and 
 to be blind to our dispositions is to stagnate 
 in the gloom of death. 
 
 April 16. 
 
 We owe to the Greek every noble disci- 
 pline in literature, every radical principle of 
 art ; and every form of convenient beauty 
 in our household furniture and daily occu- 
 pations of life. We are unable, ourselves, 
 to make a rational use of half that we have 
 received from them. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 April 17. 
 There is only one way to have a good 
 
58 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 servant ; that is, to be worthy of being well 
 served. All nature and all humanity will 
 •serve a good master, and rebel against an 
 ignoble one. 
 
 April i8. 
 
 There's no music in a " rest/* that I know 
 of; but there's the making of music in it. 
 And people are always missing that part of 
 the life-melody ; and scrambling on without 
 counting — not that it's easy \q> count; but 
 nothing on which so much depends ever is 
 easy. People are always talking of perse- 
 verance, and courage, and fortitude ; but 
 patience is the finest and worthiest part of 
 fortitude, — and the rarest, too. I know 
 twenty persevering girls for one patient one : 
 but it is only that twenty-first who can do 
 "her work, out and out, or enjoy it. For 
 patience lies at the root of all pleasure, as 
 well as of all powers. Hope herself ceases 
 to be happiness, when Impatience compan- 
 ions her. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 59 
 
 April 19. 
 The true painter ever speaks, or €ver has 
 spoken, much of his art. 
 
 —Sesame and Liues. 
 Endurance is nobler than strength, pa- 
 tience than beauty. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 April 20. 
 * * * For the resources of trees are not 
 developed until they have difficulties to con- 
 tend with, neither their tenderness of broth- 
 erly love and harmony, till they are forced 
 to choose their ways of various life where 
 there is contracted room for them, talking 
 to each other with their restrained branches. 
 The various action of trees rooting them- 
 selves in inhospitable rocks, stooping to look 
 into ravines, hiding from the search of gla- 
 cier winds, reaching forth to the rays of rare 
 sunshine, crowding down together to drink 
 at sweetest streams, climbing hand in hand 
 among the difficult slopes, opening in sud- 
 den domes round the mossy knolls, gather- 
 ing into companies at rest among the fra- 
 
6o RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 grant fields, gliding in grave procession over 
 the heavenward ridges, — nothing of this can 
 be conceived among the unvexed and un- 
 varied felicities of the lowland forest : while 
 to all these direct sources of greater beauty- 
 are added, first the power of redundance ; — 
 the mere quality of foliage visible in the 
 folds and on the promontories of a single 
 Alp being greater than that of an entire 
 lowland landscape, unless the view from 
 some cathedral tower; and to this charm of 
 redundance, that of clearer visibility, — tree 
 after tree being constantly shown in succes- 
 sive height, one behind another, instead of 
 the mere tops and flanks of masses, as in the 
 plains; and the forms of multitudes of them 
 continually defined against the clear sky, 
 near and above, or against white clouds en- 
 tangled among their branches, instead of 
 being confused in dimness of distance. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 April 21. 
 You may assuredly find perfect peace if 
 you resolve to do that which your Lord has 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 6 1 
 
 plainly required, and content that he should 
 
 indeed require no more of you than to do 
 
 justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly 
 
 with Him. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 April 22. 
 
 An educated man, is one who has under- 
 standing of his own uses, and duties in the 
 world, and therefore, of the general nature 
 of things done and existing in the world, 
 and who has so trained himself, or been 
 trained, as to turn to the best and most cour- 
 teous account whatever faculties or knowl- 
 edge he has. 
 
 —The Stones of Veicne. 
 
 April 23. 
 
 As the flower is gnawed by frost, so ever>' 
 human heart is gnawed by faithlessness. And 
 as surely, as irrevocably, as the fruit bud falls 
 before the east wind, so fails the power of 
 the kindest human heart if you meet it with 
 poison, 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
62 RUSKIJSr YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 April 24. 
 Do not think it wasted time to submit 
 yourself to any influence which may bring 
 upon you any noble feeling. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 April 25. 
 Girls should be like daisies ; nice and 
 white, with an edge of red, if you look close, 
 making the ground bright wherever they 
 are ; knowing simply and quietly that they 
 do it, and mean to do it, and that it would 
 be wrong if they didn't do it. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 April 26. 
 No government is ultimately strong, but 
 in proportion to its kindness and justice ; 
 and a nation does not strengthen, by merely 
 multiplying and diffusing itself. 
 
 — The Crown of Wii:,d Oi^ive. 
 
 April 27. 
 No man can indeed be a lover of what is 
 best in the higher walks of art, who has not 
 
RUSKIN year-book. 63 
 
 feeling and charity enough to rejoice with 
 the rude sportiveness of hearts that have 
 escaped out of prison, and to be thankful for 
 the flowers which men have laid their bur- 
 dens down to sow by the wayside. 
 
 The Stonbs op Vknice, 
 
 April 28. 
 
 You will find that the m«re resolve not to 
 be useless, and the honest desire to help 
 other people will, in the quickest and deli-, 
 catest way, improve yourself. 
 
 — Sesame and I^ii^ies. 
 
 April 29. 
 
 Anything which makes religion its 
 second object, makes religion no object. 
 God will put up with a great many things 
 in the human heart, but there is one thing 
 He will not put up with in it — a second place. 
 He who offers God a second place, offers 
 Him no place. 
 
 —Lectures on Architecture. 
 
64 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 April 30. 
 
 Make your national conscience clean, and 
 your national eyes will soon be clear. 
 
 — The Crown of W11.D Olive. 
 
 There is no climate, no place, and scarcely 
 an hour, in which nature does not exhibit 
 color which no mortal effort can imitate or 
 approach. For all our artificial pigments 
 are, even when seen under the same circum- 
 stances, dead and lightless beside her living 
 color; the green of a growing leaf, the scarlet 
 of a fresh flower, no art nor expedient can 
 
 reach. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
Such a starved bank of moss 
 
 Till that May mom 
 Blue ran flash across ; 
 
 Violets were born. 
 
 —Robert Browning. 
 
 And after April, when May follows, 
 And the whitethroat builds, and all the swal- 
 lows ! 
 Hark! where my blossomed pear-treee in the 
 
 hedge 
 Leans to the field and scatters in the clover 
 Blossoms and dew-drops — at thebent spray's 
 
 edge — 
 That's the wise thrush ; he sings twice over, 
 Lest you should think he never could recap- 
 ture 
 The first fine careless rapture ! 
 
 —Robert Browning. 
 
 65 
 
66 KUSKIIV YEAK-IWOK. 
 
 May t. 
 
 My friends have you thought, as I have 
 prayed you to think, during the days of April, 
 what things they are that will hinder you 
 from being happy on this first of May? Be 
 assured of it, you are meant, to-day, to be 
 as happy as the birds, at least if you are 
 not, you, or somebody else, or something 
 that you are one or other responsible for, is 
 wrong, and your first business is to set 
 yourself, them, or it, to rights. 
 
 — I'ORS C1.AVIGKRA. 
 
 May 2. 
 
 Hk who walks humbly with Nature will 
 seldom be in danger of losing Art. 
 
 May 3. 
 If you can fix some conception of a true 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 67 
 
 human state oflife to be striven for — life for 
 all men as for yourselves — if you can deter- 
 mine some honest and simple order of exist- 
 ence, following those trodden ways of wis- 
 dom ; which are pleasantness, and seeking her 
 quiet and withdrawn paths, which are peace ; 
 — then, and so sanctifying wealth into '* com- 
 monwealth," all your art, you literature, your 
 daily labors, your domestic affection, and 
 citizen's duty, will join and increase into one 
 magnificent harmony. 
 
 —The Crown of Wii^d Ouve. 
 
 May 4. 
 Ask the laborer in the field, at the forge, 
 or in the mine, ask the patient, delicate 
 fingered artisan, or the strong-armed, fiery- 
 hearted worker in bronze, and in marble, and 
 with the colors of light, and none of these 
 who arc true workmen, will ever tell you that 
 they have found the law of heaven an un- 
 kind one — that in the sweat of their face they 
 should eat bread, till they return to the 
 ground, nor that they ever found it unreward- 
 ed obedience, if, indeed, it was rendered 
 
68 RUSKTN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 faithfully to the command — *' Whatsoever 
 
 thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy 
 
 might." 
 
 — Sesame and Liues. 
 
 May 5. 
 
 The path of a good woman is indeed strewn 
 
 with flowers, but they rise behind her steps, 
 
 not before them. " Her feet have touched the 
 
 meadows, and left the daisies rosy." It is 
 
 little to say of a woman, that she only does 
 
 not destroy where she passes. She should 
 
 revive, the harebells should bloom, not stoop 
 
 as she passes. 
 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 May 6. 
 
 Wherever a true woman comes, home 
 is always around her. The stars may be 
 over her head, the glow-worms in the night- 
 cold grass may be the fire at her foot, but 
 
 home is where she is. 
 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 May 7. 
 Let us beware that our rest become not 
 
kUSicm YEAR-BOOIC, 69 
 
 the rest of stones, which so long as they 
 are torrent-tossed and thunder-stricken, 
 maintain their majesty, but when the stream 
 is silent and the storm past, suffer the grass 
 to cover them, and the lichen to feed them, 
 and are plowed down into dust. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 May 8. 
 
 Ah, why should we ever wear black for 
 the guests of God ! 
 
 May 9. 
 
 Folded hands are not necessarily re- 
 signed ones. The patience which really 
 smiles on grief usually stands or walks or 
 even runs. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 May 10. 
 
 If you prepare a dish of food carelessly, 
 you do not expect Providence to make it 
 palatable ; neither if, through years of folly, 
 you misguide your own life, need you ex- 
 
Jd kUSJCIN VEAk-BOOK. 
 
 pect divine interference to bring round every- 
 thing at last for the best. 
 
 May II. 
 
 Leave, therefore, boldly, though not 
 
 irreverently, mysticism and symbolism on the 
 
 one side, cast away with utter scorn geometry 
 
 and legalism on the other, seize hold of 
 
 God's hand and look well in the face of His 
 
 creation, and there is nothing He will not 
 
 enable you to achieve. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 May 12. 
 Perhaps there is no more impressive scene 
 on earth than the solitary extent of the Cam- 
 pagna of Rome under evening hght. Let 
 the reader imagine himself, for a moment, 
 withdrawn from the sounds and motions of 
 the living world, and sent forth alone into 
 this wild and wasted plain. The earth yields 
 and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he ever 
 so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow 
 and various, like the dusty wreck of the bones 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. ji 
 
 of men. The long, knotted grass moves 
 and tosses feebly in the evening wind, and 
 the shadows of its motion shake feverishly 
 along the banks of ruin that lift themselves 
 to the sunlight. Hillocks of mouldering 
 earth heave around him, as if the dead be- 
 neath were struggling in their sleep; scat- 
 tered blocks of black stone, four square, rem- 
 nants of mighty edifices, not one left upon 
 another, lie upon them to keep them down. 
 A dull purple poisonous haze stretches level 
 along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks 
 of mossy ruins, on whose rents the red light 
 rests, like dying fire on defiled altars. The 
 blue ridge of Alban Mount lifts itself against 
 a solemn space of green, clear, quiet sky. 
 Watch-towers of dark clouds stand stead- 
 fastly along the promonotories of the Ap- 
 penines. From the plain of the mountains 
 the shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, 
 melt into the darkness like the shadowy and 
 countless troops of funeral mourners passing 
 from a nation's grave. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
72 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 May 13. 
 Do not think of one falsity as harmless 
 and another as slight and another as unin- 
 tended. Cast them all aside. They may 
 be light and accidental, but they are ugly 
 soot from the smoke-pit for all that ; and it 
 is better that our hearts should be swept 
 clean of them, without overcare as to which 
 is largest or blackest. Speaking truth is 
 liking fair, and comes only by practice ; it is 
 less a matter of will than of habit, and I 
 doubt if any occasion can be trivial which 
 permits the practice and formation of such 
 a habit. To speak and act truth with con- 
 stancy and precision is nearly as difficult, 
 and perhaps as meritorious, as to speak it 
 under intimidation or penalty; and it is a 
 strange thought how many men there are, 
 as I trust, who would hold to it at the cost of 
 fortune or life, for one who would hold to it 
 at the cost of a little daily trouble. 
 
 — The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 
 
 May 14. 
 As all lovely art is rooted in virtue, so it 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 n 
 
 bears fruit of virtue, and is didactic in its 
 own nature. 
 
 —The Queen of the Air. 
 
 May 15. 
 The perfect loveliness of a woman's coun- 
 tenance can only consist in that majestic 
 peace which is founded in the memory of 
 happy and useful years, full of sweet records ; 
 and from the joinings of this with that yet 
 more majestic childishness, which is still 
 full of chance and promise, opening always, 
 modest at once, and bright with hope of 
 better things to be won and to be bestowed. 
 — Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 May 16. 
 A NATION cannot be affected by any vice 
 or weakness without expressing it, legibly, 
 and forever, either in bad art or by want of 
 art ; and there is no national virtue, small 
 or great, which is not manifestly expressed 
 in all the art which circumstances enable the 
 people possessing that virtue to produce. 
 —The Crown of Whd Oi,ive. 
 
74 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 May 17. 
 
 Whether novels or history be read, they 
 
 should be chosen not for what is out of them, 
 
 but for what is in them. The chance and 
 
 scattered evil that may here and there haunt 
 
 and hide itself in a powerful book never does 
 
 any harm to a noble girl, but the emptiness 
 
 of an author oppresses her and his amiable 
 
 folly degrades her. 
 
 —Sesame and lyiwKs. 
 
 May 18. 
 
 The seed the sower sows grows up accord- 
 ing to its kind ; let us sow good seed with 
 care and liberality. 
 
 May 19. 
 
 Every act, every impulse, of virtue and 
 vice, affects in any creature, face, voice, 
 nervous power, and vigor and harmony of 
 invention, at once. 
 
 — The Queen of the Air. 
 
 May 20. 
 Look at the clouds, and watch the delicate 
 
kUSkW YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 75 
 
 sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the 
 rounded luster of their magnificent rolling. 
 They are meant to be beheld far away ; they 
 were shaped for their place, high above your 
 head ; approach them, and they fuse into 
 vague mists, or whirl away in fierce frag- 
 ments of thunderous vapor. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 May 21. 
 Take your vase of Venice glass out of 
 the furnace, and strew chaff over it in its 
 transparent heat, and recover that to its 
 clearness and rubied glory when the north 
 wind has blown upon it : but do not think 
 to strew chaff over the child fresh from God's 
 presence, and bring the heavenly colors 
 back to him — at least not in this world. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 May 22. 
 
 All delight in art, and all love of it, re- 
 solve themselves into simple love of that 
 which deserves love. 
 
 —The Crown of Wii^d Oi^ive. 
 
76 RtJSKIN YEAR-BOO It. 
 
 May 23. 
 
 Taking up one's cross means simply that 
 you are to go to the road which you see to 
 be the straight one ; carrying whatever you 
 find is given you to carry, as well and 
 stoutly as you can ; without making faces, 
 or calling people to come and look at you. 
 Above all, you are neither to load or unload 
 yourself, nor cut your cross to your own lik- 
 ing. Some people think it would be better 
 for them to have it large, and many, that 
 they could carry it much faster if it were 
 small ; and even those who like it largest, 
 are usually very particular about its being 
 ornamental, and made of the best ebony. 
 But all that you have really to do is to keep 
 your back as straight as you can, and not 
 think about what is upon it — above all, not 
 to boast of what is upon it. 
 
 —Ethics op the Dust. 
 
 May 24. 
 
 We shall find that the love of nature, 
 whenever it has existed, has been a faithful 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 77 
 
 and sacred element of human feeling ; that 
 is to say, supposing all circumstances other- 
 wise the same with respect to two individuals, 
 the one who loves nature most will be al- 
 ways found to have more faith in God than 
 the other. 
 
 May 25. 
 
 The first universal characteristic of all 
 great art is Tenderness, as the second is 
 Truth. I find this more and more every day : 
 an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift 
 and inheritance of all the truly great men. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 May 26. 
 
 Architecture is the art which so dis- 
 poses and adorns the edifices raised by man 
 for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them 
 contributes to his mental health, power and 
 pleasure. 
 
 —The Seven Lamps oe Architecture. 
 
 May 27. 
 
 It is physically impossible for a well-edu- 
 
78 R us KIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 cated, intellectual, or brave man to make 
 money the chief object of his thoughts ; as 
 physically impossible as it is for him to make 
 his dinner the principal object of them. All 
 healthy people like their dinners, but their 
 dinner is not the main object of their lives. 
 —The Crown of Wild Owve. 
 
 May 28. 
 
 I HAVE already noticed the example of very 
 pure and high typical beauty which is to be 
 found in the lines and gradations of unsul- 
 lied snow : if, passing to the edge of a sheet 
 of it, upon the lower Alps early in May, we 
 find, as we are nearly sure to find, two or 
 three little round openings pierced in it, and 
 through these, emergent, a slender, pensive, 
 fragile flower whose small, dark, purple- 
 fringed bell hangs down and shudders over 
 the icy cleft that it has chosen, as if partly 
 wondering at its own recent grave, and partly 
 dying of very fatigue after its hard won vic- 
 tory; we shall be, or we ought to be, moved 
 by a totally different impression of loveliness 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 79 
 
 from that which we receive among the dead 
 ice and the idle clouds. There is now 
 uttered to us a call for sympathy, now 
 offered to us an image of moral purpose and 
 achievement, which, however unconscious or 
 senseless the creature may indeed be that so 
 seems to call, cannot be heard without affec- 
 tion, nor contemplated without worship, by 
 any of us whose heart is rightly tuned, or 
 whose mind is clearly and surely sighted. 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 May 29. 
 
 The first thing you have to see to in be- 
 coming soldiers, is that you make yourselves 
 wholly true. Courage is a mere matter 
 of course among any ordinarily well-born 
 youths ; but neither truth nor gentleness is 
 matter of course. You must bind them like 
 shields about your necks ; you must write 
 them on the tables of your hearts. Though 
 it be not exacted of you, yet exact it of 
 yourselves ; this vow of stainless truth. 
 Your hearts are, if you leave them unstirred, 
 
8o RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 as tombs in which a god lies buried. Vow 
 
 yourselves crusaders to redeem that sacred 
 
 sepulcher. 
 
 — The Crown of Wii<d Oi^ivk. 
 
 May 30. 
 
 I DO not understand the feeling which 
 would arch our own gates and pave our own 
 thresholds, and leave the church with its 
 narrow door and foot-worn sill ; the feeling 
 which enriches our own chambers with all 
 manner of costliness, and endures the bare 
 wall and mean compass of the temple. 
 
 — The Seven Lamps oe Architecture. 
 
 May 31. 
 
 Every virtue of the higher phases of 
 manly character begins in this ; — in truth 
 and modesty before the face of all maidens ; 
 in truth and pity, or truth and reverence, to 
 all womanhood. 
 
 —The Crown oe Wii<d Oi^ive, 
 
June* 
 
 And what is so rare as a day in June ? 
 
 Then, if ever, come perfect days ; 
 Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, 
 
 And over it softly her warm ear lays : 
 Whether we look, or whether we listen. 
 We hear Hfe murmur, or see it glisten ; 
 
 Every clod feels a stir of might. 
 An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 
 
 And, groping blindly above it for light 
 Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers ; 
 
 The flush of life may well be seen 
 Thrilling back over hills and valleys ; 
 
 The cowslip startles in meadows green. 
 The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, 
 
 And there's never a leaf or a blade too mean 
 To be some happy creature's palace ; 
 
 The little bird sits at his door in the sun, 
 Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, 
 
 And lets his illumined being o'errun 
 
 8i 
 
82 RUSKJN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 With the deluge of summer it receives ; 
 His mate feels the ^^^ beneath her wings, 
 And the heart in her dumb breast flutters 
 
 and sings ; 
 He sings to the wide world, and she to her 
 
 nest, — 
 In the wise ear of nature which song is the 
 
 best? 
 
 — ^jAMES RUSSEI^I, LOWEI,L. 
 
RUSK IN YEAR-BOOK. 83 
 
 June i. 
 
 Nature has a thousand ways and means 
 of rising above herself, but incomparably 
 the noblest manifestation of her capability 
 of color are in the sunsets among the high 
 clouds. I speak especially of the moment 
 before the sun sinks, when his light turns 
 pure rose-color, and when this light falls 
 upon a zenith covered with countless cloud 
 forms of inconceivable delicacy, threads and 
 flakes of vapor which would in common day- 
 light be pure snow-white, and which give 
 therefore fair fields to the tone of light. 
 There is no limit to the multitude, and no 
 check to the intensity, of the hues, assumed. 
 The whole sky from zenith to the horizon, 
 becomes one molten, mantling sea of color 
 and fire ; every black bar turns into massy 
 gold, every ripple and wave into unsullied, 
 shadowless crimson, and purple, and scarlet, 
 
84 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 and colors for which there are no words in 
 language and no ideas in the mind, — things 
 which can only be conceived while they are 
 visible — the intense hollow blue of the upper 
 sky melting through it all — showing how 
 deep and pure and lightless, there modulated 
 by the filmy, formless body of the trans- 
 parent vapor, till it is lost impenetrably in 
 its crimson and gold. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 June 2. 
 
 Beauty has been appointed by the Deity 
 
 to be one of the elements by which the 
 
 human soul is continually sustained ; it is 
 
 therefore to be found more or less in all 
 
 natural objects, but in order that we may 
 
 not satiate ourselves with it, and weary of 
 
 it, it is rarely granted to us in its utmost 
 
 degrees. 
 
 — Lectures on Architecture. 
 
 June 3. 
 
 You will find that, in fact, all plants are 
 composed of essentially two parts — the leaf 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 85 
 
 and root — one loving the light, the other 
 darkness ; one liking to be clean, the other 
 to be dirty ; one liking to grow for the most 
 part up, the other for the most part down, 
 and each having faculties and purposes of 
 its own. But the pure one, which loves the 
 light, has above all things, the purpose of 
 being married to another leaf, and having 
 child-leaves, and children's children of leaves, 
 to make the earth fair forever. And when 
 the leaves marry, they put on wedding-robes, 
 and are more glorious than Solomon in all 
 his glory, and they have feasts of honey, and 
 we call them " Flowers." 
 
 — FoRS Clavigera. 
 
 June 4. 
 
 All those beautiful violet veinings and 
 variegations of the marbles of Sicily and 
 Spain, the glowing orange and amber colors 
 of Siena, the deep russet of the Rossoantico, 
 and the blood-colors of all the precious 
 jaspers that enrich the temples of Italy, and, 
 finally, all the lovely transitions of tint in 
 
86 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 the pebbles of Scotland and the Rhine, which 
 form, though not the most precious, by far 
 the most interesting portion of our modern 
 jewelers* work, — all these are painted by 
 nature with this one material only, variously 
 proportioned and applied — the oxide of iron. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 June 5. 
 No book is worth anything which is not 
 worth much, nor is it serviceable until it has 
 been read and re-read, and loved and loved 
 again, and marked so that you can refer to 
 the passage you want in it, as a soldier can 
 seize the weapon he needs in an armory. 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 June 6. 
 All building, therefore, shows man either 
 as gathering or governing, and the secrets 
 of his success are his knowing what to gather 
 and how to rule. These are the two great 
 intellectual Lamps of Architecture, the one 
 consisting in a just and humble veneration 
 for the works of God upon the earth, and 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 87 
 
 the other in an understanding of the dominion 
 
 over those works which has been vested in 
 
 man. 
 
 — Th« Seven Lamps of Architecture. 
 
 June 7. 
 For a young person the safest temper is 
 one of reverence, and the safest place one of 
 obscurity. Certainly at present, and perhaps, 
 all through your life, your teachers are wisest 
 when they make you content in quiet virtue, 
 and that literature and art are best for you 
 which point out in common life and familiar 
 things the objects for hopeful labor and for 
 humble love. 
 
 June 8. 
 In every rebuke that we utter of men's 
 vices, we put forth a claim upon their hearts: 
 if for every assertion of God's demands from 
 them we could substitute a display of His 
 kindness to them; if side by side with every 
 warning of death we could exhibit proofs 
 and promises of immortality, if, in fine, in- 
 stead of assuming the being of an awful 
 
88 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 Deity, which men, though they cannot and 
 dare not deny, are always unwilling, some- 
 times unable, to conceive, we were to show 
 them a near, visible, inevitable, but all- 
 beneficent Deity, whose presence makes the 
 earth itself a heaven, I think there would 
 be fewer deaf children sitting in the market- 
 place. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 June 9. 
 Pride is base from the necessary foolish- 
 ness of it, because at its best, that is when 
 grounded on a just estimation of our own 
 elevation or superiority above certain others, 
 it cannot but imply that our eyes look down- 
 ward only, and have never been raised above 
 our own measure ; for there is not the man 
 so lofty in his own standing nor capacity 
 but he must be humble in thinking of the 
 cloud habitation and farsight of the angelic 
 intelligences above him, and in perceiving 
 what infinity there is of things he cannot know 
 nor reach unto, as it stands compared with 
 that wicked and fond attributing of such ex- 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 89 
 
 cellency as he may have to himself, and 
 
 thinking of it as his own getting, which is 
 
 the real essence and criminal of pride, nor of 
 
 those viler forms of it, founded on false 
 
 estimation of things beneath us and irrational 
 
 contemning of them. But taken at its best, 
 
 it is still base to that degree that there is no 
 
 grandeur of feature which it cannot destroy 
 
 and make despicable. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 June 10. 
 He who has once stood beside the grave 
 to look back upon the companionship which 
 has been forever closed, feeling how impo- 
 tent there are the wild love, or the keen sor- 
 row, to give one instant's pleasure to the 
 pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest meas- 
 ure to the departed spirit for the hour of 
 unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur 
 that debt to the heart, which can only be 
 
 discharged to the dust. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 June ii. 
 Live always in the springtime in the 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 country. You do not know what leaf-form 
 is unless you have seen the buds burst and 
 the young leaves breathing low in the sun- 
 shine, and wondering at the first shower of 
 
 rain. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 June 12. 
 
 We habitually think of the rain-cloud only 
 as dark and gray ; not knowing that we owe 
 to it perhaps the fairest, though not the most 
 dazzling, of the hues of heaven. Often in 
 our English mornings, the rain-clouds in the 
 dawn form soft level fields which melt im- 
 perceptibly into the blue, or when of less 
 extent, gather into apparent bars crossing 
 the sheets of broader cloud above ; and all 
 these bathed throughout in an unspeakable 
 light of pure rose-color, and purple, and 
 amber, and blue, not shining but misty soft ; 
 the barred masses, when seen nearer, com- 
 posed of clusters or tresses of cloud, like 
 floss of silk ; looking as if each knot were a 
 little swathe or sheaf of lighted rain. No 
 
RUSK IN YEAR-BOOK. 91 
 
 clouds form such skies, none are so tender, 
 
 various, inimitable. 
 
 — MoDKRN Painters. 
 
 June 13. 
 It is not in words explicable, with what 
 divine lines and lights the exercise of godli- 
 ness and charity will mold and gild the 
 hardest and coldest countenance, neither to 
 what darkness their departure will consign 
 the loveliest. For there is not any virtue 
 the exercise of which, even momentarily, 
 will not impress a new fairness upon the fea- 
 tures ; neither on them only but on the 
 whole body the moral and intellectual facul- 
 ties have operation, for all the movements 
 and gestures, however slight, are different in 
 their modes according to the mind that gov- 
 erns them — and on the gentleness and decis- 
 ion of right feeling follow grace of actions, 
 and through continuance of this, grace of 
 
 form. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 June 14. 
 
 The unity of spirits is partly in their sym- 
 
92 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK 
 
 pathy, and partly in their giving and taking, 
 and always in their love, and these are their 
 delight and their strength : for their strength 
 is in their co-working and army fellowship, 
 and their delight is in the giving and receiv- 
 ing of alternate and perpetual currents of 
 good. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 June 15. 
 
 As we travel the way of life, we have the 
 choice, according to our working of turning 
 all the voices of Nature into one song of re- 
 joicing ; and all her lifeless creations into a 
 glad company, whereof the meanest shall be 
 beautiful in our eyes by its kind message ; 
 or of withdrawing and quenching her sym- 
 pathy, into a fearful withdrawn silence of 
 condemnation, or into a crying out of her 
 stones and a shaking off her dust against us. 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 June 16. 
 
 Great art is the type of strong and noble 
 life ; for, as the ignoble person, in his deal- 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 93 
 
 ings with all that occurs in the world about 
 him, first sees nothing clearly, — looks noth- 
 ing fairly in the face, and then allows him- 
 self to be swept away by the trampling tor- 
 rent, and unescapable force, of the things 
 that he would not foresee, and could not 
 understand : so the noble person, looking 
 the facts of the world full in the face, and 
 fathoming them with deep faculty, then deals 
 with them in unalarmed intelligence and un- 
 hurried strength, and becomes, with his 
 human intellect and will, no unconscious and 
 insignificant agent, in consummating their 
 good and restraining their evil. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 June 17. 
 
 Not by rule, not by study, can the gift of 
 graceful proportionate design be obtained : 
 only by the intuition of genius can so much 
 as a single tier of facade be beautifully ar- 
 ranged ; and the man has just cause for pride, 
 as far as our gifts can ever be a cause for 
 pride, who finds himself able, in a design of 
 
94 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 his own, to rival even the simplest arrange- 
 ment of parts in one by San Micheli, Inigo 
 Jones, or Christopher Wren. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 June i8. 
 
 Lessons to be learned from the humility 
 and cheerfulness of the grass : Its humility, 
 in that it seems created only for the lowest 
 service — appointed to be trodden upon. Its 
 cheerfulness, in that it seems to exult under 
 all kinds of violence and suffering. You 
 roll it and it is stronger the next day ; you 
 mow it, and it multiplies its shoots as if it 
 were grateful ; you tread upon it, and it only 
 sends up richer perfume. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 June 19. 
 
 All the wide world of vegetation blooms 
 and bends for you ; the leaves tremble that 
 you may bid them be still under the marble 
 snow ; the thorn and thistle, which the earth 
 easts forth as evil, are to you the kindliest 
 servants ; no dying petal, nor drooping 
 
R us KIN YEAR-BOOK. 95 
 
 tendril, so feeble as to have no help for you ; 
 no robed pride of blossom so kingly, but rt 
 will lay aside its purple to receive at your 
 hands the pale immortality. 
 
 — Thb Two Paths. 
 
 June 20. 
 
 Far among the woodlands and the rocks, 
 — far in the darkness of the terrible streets, 
 — feeble florets are lying, with all their fresh 
 leaves torn, and their stems broken-— will 
 you never go down to them, nor set them in 
 order, nor fence them in their shuddering 
 from the fierce wind ? 
 
 — Sbsame and Lii^iks. 
 
 June 21. 
 Of all facts concerning art, this is the one 
 most necessary to be known, that, while 
 manufacture is the work of hands only, art 
 is the work of the whole spirit of man ; and 
 as that spirit is, so is the deed of it ; and by 
 whatever power of vice or virtue any art is 
 produced, the same vice or virtue it repro- 
 duces and teaches. That which is born of 
 
96 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 evil begets evil ; and that which is born of 
 valor and honor, teaches valor and honor. 
 All art is either infection or education. It 
 must be one or other of these. 
 
 — The Queen of the Air. 
 
 June 22. 
 And whether consciously or not, you must 
 be, in many a heart, enthroned ; there is no 
 putting by that crown ; queens you must al- 
 ways be ; queens to your lovers ; queens to 
 your husbands and sons ; queens of higher 
 mystery to the world beyond, which bows 
 itself and will forever bow, before the myrtle 
 crown, and the stainless scepter, of woman- 
 hood. 
 
 — Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 June 23. 
 To give alms is nothing unless you give 
 thought also ; therefore, it is written, not 
 " blessed is he that feedeth the poor," but 
 " blessed is he that considereth the poor." 
 — lyECTURES ON Architecture. 
 
 June 24. 
 Life is real — not evanescent nor slight. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 97 
 
 It does not vanish away ; every noble life 
 leaves the fiber of it, forever, in the work 
 of the world ; by so much, evermore, the 
 strength of the human race has gained. 
 
 — Pearls for Young IvAdies. 
 
 June 25. 
 
 You cannot think that the buckling on 
 
 the knight's armor by a lady's hand was a 
 
 mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is the 
 
 type of an eternal truth — that the soul's 
 
 armor is never well set to the heart unless a 
 
 woman's hand has braced it ; and it is only 
 
 when she braces it loosely that the honor of 
 
 womanhood fails. 
 
 — Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 June 26. 
 
 A STONE, when it is examined, will be 
 found a mountain in miniature. The fine- 
 ness of Nature's work is so great, that, into 
 a single block, a foot or two in diameter, she 
 can compress as many changes of form and 
 structure, in a small scale, as she needs for 
 her mountains in a large one ; and, taking 
 7 
 
98 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 moss for forests, and grains of crystal for 
 
 crags, the surface of a stone, in by far the 
 
 plurality of instances, is more interesting 
 
 than the surface of an ordinary hill ; more 
 
 fantastic in form, and incomparably richer in 
 
 color. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 June 27. 
 It is a strange thing how little in general 
 people know about the sky. It is the part 
 of creation in which Nature has done more 
 for the sake of pleasing man, more for the 
 sole and evident purpose of talking to him, 
 and teaching him, than in any other of her 
 works, and it is just the part in which we 
 least attend to her. Every essential purpose 
 of the sky might, so far as we know, be an- 
 swered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, 
 a great, ugly, black rain-cloud were brought 
 up over the blue again till ne-xt time, with 
 perhaps a film morning and evening mist for 
 dew. And, instead of this, there is not a 
 moment of our lives, when nature is not pro- 
 ducing scene after scene, picture after pic- 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 99 
 
 ture, glory after glory, and working still 
 upon such exquisite and constant principles 
 of the most perfect beauty, and it is quite 
 certain it is all done for us, and intended for 
 our perpetual pleasure. And every man, 
 wherever placed, however far from other 
 sources of interest or of beauty, has this do- 
 ing for him constantly. The sky is fitted in 
 all its functions for the perpetual comfort 
 and exaltation of the heart, for the soothing 
 it and purifying it from its dross and dust. 
 Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, 
 sometimes awful, never the same for two 
 minutes together; almost human in its pas- 
 sions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, al- 
 most divine in its infinity. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 June 28. 
 A WOMAN has a personal work and duty, 
 relating to her home, and a public work and 
 duty, which is also the expansion of that. 
 The woman's work for her own home is to 
 secure its order, comfort and loveliness. 
 The woman's duty, as a member of the 
 
lOO RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 commonwealth, is to assist in the ordering, 
 in the comforting and in the beautiful adorn- 
 ment of the state. What the woman is to 
 be within her gates, as the center of order, 
 the balm of distress and the mirror of beauty ; 
 that she is also to be without her gates, 
 where order is more difficult, distress more 
 imminent and loveliness more rare. 
 
 — Sesame and Liues. 
 
 June 29. 
 This is the true nature of home — it is 
 the place of peace ; the shelter not only 
 from all injury, but from all terror and diver- 
 sion. ... So far as it is a sacred place, a 
 vestal temple, a temple of the earth watched 
 over by the household gods, before whose 
 faces none may come but those whom they 
 can receive with love, — so far as it is this, 
 and roof and fire are types only of a nobler 
 shade and light, — shade as of the rock in a 
 weary land, and light as of the Pharos in 
 the stormy sea ; — so far it vindicates the 
 same and fulfils the praise of home. 
 
 —Sesame ajst© l,ii.ies. 
 
kUSKm YEAR-BOOJt. I6l 
 
 June 30. 
 
 The pine is trained to need nothing and 
 to endure everything. It is resolvedly 
 whole, self-contained, content with restricted 
 completion. Tall or short, it will be straight. 
 Small or large, it will be round. It may be 
 permitted to these soft, lowland trees that 
 they should make themselves gay with show 
 of blossom and glad with pretty charities of 
 fruitfulness. We builders with the sword 
 have harder work to do for man, and must 
 do it in close-set troops. To stay the sliding 
 of the mountain snows, which would bury 
 him ; to hold in divided drops, at our sword 
 points, the rain, which would sweep away 
 him and his treasured fields ; to nurse in 
 shade among our brown fallen leaves the 
 tricklings that feed the brooks in drought ; 
 to give massive shield against the winter 
 wind, which shrieks through the bare 
 branches of the plain — such service we do 
 Him steadfastly while we live. Our bodies, 
 also, are at His service ; softer than the 
 bodies of other trees, though our toil is 
 harder than theirs. —Modern Painters. 
 
All day fierce heat had held the quivering 
 
 earth 
 In iron grip. The sky from red to pale 
 Had turned with fear; and white and still 
 The clouds had crept away in masses to the 
 
 north. 
 The meadow hazels, *neath their clustered 
 
 load 
 Of satin and green-ruffled nuts, had dropped. 
 Sweet ferns had knelt to die ; and choked 
 
 and mute 
 Since morn had laid the cricket, hid below 
 The fallen spear of water-flags. In dumb 
 Amaze the patient cattle to their bars 
 Had crowded, waiting help. All nature 
 
 gasped ; 
 All life seemed sinking into death ! 
 In distant sunset depths, a solemn sound. 
 
 Then rose, 
 
 102 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 103 
 
 The wheels of God's great chariot, rolling 
 
 slow ! 
 An instant more, and with sharp blaze and 
 
 boom, 
 His signal-guns lit up and shook the sky, 
 With word of succor on the way ! and then 
 The still, small voice of rain, in which He 
 
 was. 
 And cooled and lulled His fainting world to 
 
 sleep. 
 
 — Anon. 
 
104 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 July i. 
 
 Art is valuable or otherwise, only as it 
 expresses the personality, activity and living 
 perception of a good and great soul ; it may 
 express and contain this with little help 
 from execution, and less from science ; and 
 if it have not this, if it show not the vigor, 
 perception and invention of a mighty human 
 spirit, it is worthless. 
 
 July 2. 
 
 / believe every man in a Christian king- 
 dom ought to be equally well educated. But 
 I would have his education to purpose, 
 stern, practical, irresistible in moral habits, 
 in bodily strength and beauty, in all faculties 
 of mind capable of being developed under 
 the circumstances of the individual, and 
 especially in the technical knowledge of his 
 own business ; but yet, infinitely various in 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 105 
 
 its effort, directed to make one youth humble 
 and another confident ; to tranquilize this 
 mind, to put some spark of ambition into 
 that ; now to urge and now to restrain. 
 
 —The Stones oe Venice. 
 
 July 3. 
 A GROUP of trees changes the color of its 
 leafage from week to week, and its position 
 from day to day ; it is sometimes languid 
 with heat and sometimes heavy with rain ; 
 the torrent swells of falls in shower or sun ; 
 the best leaves of the foreground may be 
 dined upon by cattle, or trampled by unwel- 
 come investigators of the chosen scene. 
 But the cliff can neither be eaten, nor tram- 
 pled down ; neither bowed by the shadow, 
 nor withered by the heat : it is always ready 
 for us when we are inclined to labour; will 
 always wait for us when we are inclined to 
 converse. With its own patient and victori- 
 ous presence, cleaving daily through cloud 
 after cloud, and re-appearing still through 
 the tempest drift lofty and serene, amidst 
 the passing rents of blue, it seems partly to 
 
Jo6 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 rebuke, and partly to regard, and partly to 
 calm and chasten, the agitations of the 
 feeble human soul that watches it ; and that 
 must be indeed a dark perplexity, or a griev- 
 ous pain, which will not be in some degree 
 enlightened or relieved by the vision of it, 
 when the evening shadows are blue on its 
 foundation, and the last rays of the sunset 
 resting on the fair heights of its golden 
 fortitude. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 July 4. 
 Every landscape painter should know the 
 specific characters of every object he has to 
 represent, rock, flower, or cloud ; and in his 
 highest ideal works, all their distinctions will 
 be perfectly expressed, broadly or delicately, 
 slightly or completely, according to the 
 nature of the subject, and the degree of at- 
 tention which is to be drawn to the particu- 
 lar object by the part it plays in the compo- 
 sition. Where the sublime is aimed at, such 
 distinctions will be indicated with severe 
 simplicity, as the muscular markings in a 
 
kUSKIN YEAk'BOOK. 107 
 
 colossal statue ; where beauty is the object, 
 they must be expressed with the utmost 
 refinement of which the hand is capable. 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 July 5. 
 
 In the exact proportion in which men are 
 educated to love, to think and to endure, 
 they become noble, live happily, die calmly; 
 are remembered with perpetual honor by 
 their race, and for the perpetual good of it. 
 
 July 6. 
 
 It is not the object of education to turn 
 the woman into a dictionary, but it is deeply 
 necessary that she should be taught to enter 
 with her whole personality into the history 
 she reads; to picture the passages of it in 
 her own bright imagination ; to apprehend, 
 with her fine instincts, the pathetic circum- 
 stances, and dramatic relations, which the 
 historian too often only eclipses by his rea- 
 soning, and disconnects by his arrangement : 
 it is for her to trace the hidden equities of 
 
lo8 RVSKIN YEAR-BOOtC. 
 
 Divine reward, and catch sight, through the 
 darkness, of the fateful threads of woven fire 
 that connect error with retribution. But 
 chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend 
 the limits of her sympathy with respect to 
 that history which is being forever deter- 
 mined as the moments pass in which she 
 draws her peaceful breath, and to the con- 
 temporary calamity, which, were it but 
 rightly mourned by her, would recur no more 
 hereafter. She is to exercise herself in 
 imaging what would be the effect upon her 
 mind and conduct if she were daily brought 
 into the presence of the suffering which is 
 not the less real because shut from her sight. 
 She is to be taught somewhat to understand 
 the nothingness of the proportion which that 
 little world in which she lives and loves, 
 bears to the world in which God lives and 
 loves ; and solemnly she is to be taught to 
 strive that her thoughts of piety may not be 
 feeble in proportion to the number they 
 embrace, nor her prayer more languid than 
 it is for the momentary relief from pain of 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 109 
 
 her husband or her child, when it is uttered 
 for the multitudes of those who have none 
 to love them, and is " for all who are deso- 
 late and oppressed." 
 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 July 7. 
 
 What do you think made Michael An- 
 gelo look back to the dome of Santa Maria 
 del Fiori, saying, " Like thee I will not 
 build one; better than thee I cannot"? 
 Which of you, having been in Florence, can 
 tell me honestly he saw anything wonderful 
 in it ? But Michael Angelo knew the exact 
 proportion of thickness to weight and curva- 
 ture which enabled it to stand as securely 
 as a mountain of adamant, though it was 
 only a film of clay, as frail in proportion, as 
 a sea-shell. Over the massy war tower of 
 the city it floated ; fragile, yet without fear. 
 
 July 8. 
 
 All art is great, and good and true, only 
 so far as it is distinctively the work of man- 
 
no RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 hood in its entire and highest sense, that is 
 
 to say, not the work of limbs and fingers, 
 
 but of soul, 
 
 Thk Stones of Venice. 
 
 July 9. 
 If our right hand is not to know what our 
 left hand does, it must not be because it 
 would be ashamed if it did. 
 
 — The Crown of Wii,d OIvIVE. 
 
 July 10. 
 God has made every man fit for his work; 
 He has given to the man whom he means 
 for a student, the reflective, the logical, se- 
 quential faculties ; and to the man whom 
 He means for an artist, the perceptive, sen- 
 sitive, retentive faculties. And neither of 
 these men, so far from being able to do the 
 other's work, can even comprehend the way 
 in which it is done. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 July ii. 
 All nature with one voice, with one glory, 
 is set to teach you reverence for the life 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. iii 
 
 communicated to you from the Father of 
 Spirits. The song of birds, and their plum- 
 age ; the scent of flowers, their color, their 
 very existence, are in direct connection with 
 the mystery of that communicated life ; and 
 all the strength, and all the arts of men, are 
 measured by, and founded upon, their rever- 
 ence for the passion, and their guardianship 
 
 of the purity of Love. 
 
 —The EagivE's Nest. 
 
 July 12. 
 
 *' Charity is greater than justice." Yes, 
 it is greater; it is the summit of justice, it 
 is the temple of which justice is the founda- 
 tion. But you can't have the top without 
 the bottom ; you cannot build upon charity. 
 You must build upon justice, for this main 
 reason, that you have not, at first, charity 
 to build with. Do justice to your brother 
 (you can do that whether you love him or 
 not), and you will come to love him. 
 
 —The Crown of W11.D Oi^ivE. 
 
 July 13. 
 All good architecture i§ the expression 
 
112 RUSKI^r YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 of national life and character, and is produced 
 by a prevalent and eager national taste or 
 desire for beauty. 
 
 — The Crown of WiiyD Owve. 
 
 July 14. 
 
 Taste is not only a part and index of 
 morality : it is the only morality. The first, 
 and last, and closest trial question to any liv- 
 ing creature is, " What do you like ? " Tell me 
 what you like and I'll tell you what you are. 
 — The Crown oe W11.D Olive. 
 
 July 15. 
 
 It is the law of good economy to make 
 the best of everything. How much more to 
 make the best of every creature ! There- 
 fore, when your pauper comes to you to ask 
 for bread, ask him instantly, '* What faculty 
 have you? What can you do best? Can 
 you drive a nail into wood ? Go and mend 
 the parish fences. Can you lay a brick ? 
 Mend the walls of the cottages where the 
 wind comes in. Can you lift a spadeful of 
 earth? Turn this field up three feet deep 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 113 
 
 all over. Can you only drag a weight with 
 your shoulders? Stand at the bottom of 
 this hill and help up the overladen horses. 
 Can you weld iron and chisel stone ? Fortify 
 this wreck-strewn coast into a harbor, and 
 change these shifting sands into fruitful 
 ground. Wherever death was, bring life. 
 That is to be your work ; that your parish 
 refuge ; that your education." 
 
 —Crown of Wild Owvjss. 
 
 July 16. 
 
 Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving 
 the greatest possible pleasure from those 
 material sources which are attractive to our 
 moral nature in its purity and perfection. 
 He who receives little pleasure from these 
 sources, wants taste ; he who receives pleas- 
 ure from any other sources, has false or bad 
 taste. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 July 17. 
 The truth of nature is a part of the truth 
 
114 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 of God. To him who does not search it 
 out, darkness, as it is to him who does, in- 
 finity. 
 
 ■—Modern Painters. 
 
 July i8. 
 
 Ideas of beauty are among the noblest 
 which can be presented to the human mind, 
 invariably exalting and purifying it accord- 
 ing to their degree; and it would appear 
 that we are intended by the Deity to be con- 
 stantly under their influence, because there 
 is not one single object in nature which is 
 not capable of conveying them, and which, 
 to the rightly-perceiving mind, does not pre- 
 sent an incalculably greater number of beau- 
 tiful than of deformed parts ; there being in 
 fact scarcely anything, in pure, undiseased 
 nature, like positive deformity, but only de- 
 grees of beauty, or such slight and rare points 
 of permitted contrast as may render all 
 around them more valuable by their opposi- 
 tion, sparks of blackness in creation, to make 
 its colors felt. 
 
 — MoPERN Painters, 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 115 
 
 July 19. 
 
 Nothing can atone for the want of truth, 
 not the most brilliant imagination, the most 
 playful fancy, the most pure feeling (suppos- 
 ing that feeling could be pure and false at 
 the same time), not the most exalted con- 
 ception, nor the most comprehensive grasp 
 of intellect, can make amends for the want 
 of truth, and that for two reasons ; first, be- 
 cause falsehood is in itself revolting and de- 
 grading ; and secondly, because nature is so 
 immeasurably superior to all that the human 
 mind can conceive, that every departure 
 from her is a fall beneath her, so that there 
 can be no such thing as an ornamental false- 
 hood. All falsehood must be a blot as well 
 as a sin, an injury as well as a deception. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 July 20. 
 
 How many people are misled, by what 
 has been said and sung of the serenity of 
 Italian skies, to suppose they must be more 
 blue than the skies of the north ; and think 
 
Ii6 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 that they see them so ; whereas the sky of 
 Italy is far more dull and gray in color than 
 the skies of the north, and is distinguished 
 only by its intense repose of light. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 July 2I. 
 I KNOW few persons so convinced of the 
 splendor of the rooms in their Father's house 
 as to be happier when their friends are called 
 to those mansions, than they would have 
 been if the Queen had sent for them to live 
 at court; nor has the Church's most ardent 
 desire to " depart and be with Christ," ever 
 cured it of the singular habit of putting on 
 mourning for every person summoned to 
 such departure. 
 
 July 22. 
 
 Though nature is constantly beautiful, 
 
 she does not exhibit her highest powers of 
 
 beauty constantly, for then they would satiate 
 
 us, and pall upon our senses. It is necessary 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. ny 
 
 to their appreciation that they should be 
 rarely shown. Her finest touches are things 
 which must be watched for ; her most perfect 
 passages of beauty are the most evanescent. 
 She is constantly doing something beautiful 
 for us; but it is something which she has not 
 done before and will not do again ; some ex- 
 hibition of her general powers in particular 
 circumstances which, if we do not catch at 
 the instant it is passing, will not be repeated 
 for us. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 July 23. 
 
 If the artist is painting something that he 
 knows and loves, as he knows it because he 
 loves it, whether it be the fair strawberry of 
 Cima, or the clear sky of Francia, or the 
 blazing incomprehensible mist of Turner, he 
 is all right ; but the moment he does any- 
 thing as he thinks it ought to be, because he 
 does not care about it he is all wrong. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
Ii8 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 July 24. 
 
 God appoints to every one of his creatures, 
 a separate mission, and if they discharge it 
 honorably, if they quit themselves like men 
 and faithfully follow that light which is in 
 them, withdrawing from it all cold and 
 quenching influence there will assuredly 
 come of it such burning as, in its appointed 
 mode and measure, shall shine before men, 
 and be of service constant and holy. De- 
 grees infinite of luster there must always be, 
 but the weakest among us has a gift, how- 
 ever seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to 
 him, and which worthily used will be a gift 
 also to his race forever — 
 
 " Fool not," says George Herbert, 
 '* For all may have 
 If they dare choose, a glorious life or grave." 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 July 25. 
 In our whole life-melody the music is 
 broken off here and there by " rests," and 
 we foolishly think we have come to the end 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 of the tune. God sends a time of forced 
 leisure, a time of sickness and disappointed 
 plans, and makes a sudden pause in the 
 choral hymn of our lives, and we lament that 
 our voices must be silent and our part miss- 
 ing in the music which ever goes up to the 
 ear of the Creator. * * * Not without 
 design does God write the music of our lives. 
 Be it ours to learn the tune and not be dis- 
 mayed at the *' rests." If we look up, God 
 will beat the time for us. 
 
 July 26. 
 Art is no recreation ; it cannot be learned 
 in spare moments, nor pursued when we 
 have nothing better to do. It is no handi- 
 work for drawing-room tables ; no relief of 
 the ennui of boudoir; it must be understood 
 and undertaken seriously or not at all. To 
 advance it men's lives must be given, and to 
 receive it their hearts. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 July 27. 
 If we look at nature carefully, we shall 
 
I20 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 find that her colors are in a state of perpetual 
 confusion and indistinctness, while her forms 
 as told by light and shade are invariably 
 clear, distinct, and speaking. The stones 
 and gravel of the banks catch green reflections 
 from the boughs above ; the bushes receive 
 grays and yellows from the ground ; every 
 hair-breadth of polished surface gives a little 
 bit of the blue of the sky or the gold of the 
 sun, like a star upon the local color ; this 
 local color, changeful and uncertain in itself, 
 is again disguised and modified by the hue 
 of the light, or quenched in the gray of the 
 shadow ; and the confusion and blending of 
 tint is altogether so great, that were we left 
 to find out what objects were by their colors 
 only, we would scarcely in places distinguish 
 the boughs of a tree from the air beyond 
 them, or the ground beneath them. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 July 28. 
 Man's use and function is to be the wit- 
 ness of the glory of God, and to advance that 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 12 1 
 
 glory by his reasonable obedience and result- 
 ant happiness. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 July 29. 
 All things may be elevated by affection, 
 as the spikenard of Mary, and in the Song of 
 Solomon, the myrrh upon the handles of the 
 lock, and that of Isaac concerning his son. 
 And the general law for all these pleasures is, 
 that when sought in the abstract and ardently, 
 they are foul things, but when received with 
 thankfulness and with reference to God's 
 glory, they become theoretic, and so I can 
 find something divine in the sweetness of 
 wild fruits, as well as in the pleasantness of 
 the pure air, and the tenderness of its natural 
 perfumes that come and go as they list. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 July 30. 
 The teaching of nature is as varied and 
 infinite as it is constant ; and the duty of the 
 painter is to watch for every one of her les- 
 
122 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 sons, and to give (for human life will admit 
 of nothing more) those in which she has 
 manifested each of her principles in the most 
 peculiar and striking way. The deeper his 
 research and the rarer the phenomena he has 
 noted, the more valuable will his works be ; 
 to repeat himself, even in a single instance, 
 is treachery to nature, for a thousand human 
 lives would not be enough to give one in- 
 stance of the perfect manifestation of each of 
 her powers ; and as for combining or classi- 
 fying them, as well might a preacher expect 
 in one sermon to express and explain every 
 divine truth which can be gathered out of 
 God's revelation, as a painter expert in one 
 composition to express and illustrate every 
 lesson which can be received from God's 
 creation. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 July 31. 
 
 Only in proportion as we draw near to 
 God, and are made in measure like unto him, 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOO Ks 123 
 
 can we increase this our possession of char- 
 ity, of which the entire essence is in God 
 
 only. 
 
 -^ —Modern Painters. 
 
Huaust 
 
 The waterfalls are low. With leaf or bough 
 The winds converse but seldom ; thy true 
 voice, 
 
 August, is the thunder ! So rejoice 
 Rich powerful spirits, and of these art thou, 
 With passion deep thou dost the earth en- 
 dow, 
 
 Bringing to temperate climes an India near, 
 Making the meadows pale — golden the ear 
 Of rustling corn ; and capable to bow 
 The inmost spirit with an awful fear 
 When, lightning-charged, thy lofty turret- 
 clouds 
 Stand out with edges white against the blue 
 And breathless heaven. Oh, far from towns 
 and clouds 
 
 1 would thy bounty and thy anger view, 
 Tempered by mountain breezes, cool and 
 
 clear. 
 
 — Chauncey Horr Townsenb. 
 124 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 125 
 
 August i. 
 
 Rejoice ! ye fields, rejoice ! and wave with 
 gold, 
 
 When August round her precious gifts is 
 flinging ; 
 
 Lo ! the crushed wain is slowly homeward 
 rolled. 
 
 The sunburnt reapers jocund lays are sing- 
 ing. 
 
 August 2. 
 
 Our purity of taste, is best tested by its 
 universality, for if we can only admire this 
 thing or that, we may be sure that our cause 
 for liking is of a finite and false nature. But 
 if we can perceive beauty in everything of 
 God's doing, we may argue that we have 
 reached the true perception of its universal 
 laws. However false taste may be known 
 by its fastidiousness, by its demands of 
 
126 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 pomp, splendor, and unusual combination, 
 by its enjoyment only of particular styles 
 and modes of things, and by its pride also, 
 for it is forever meddling, mending, accum- 
 ulating, and self-exulting, its eye is always 
 upon itself, and it tests all things around it 
 by the way they fit it. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 3. 
 Words are not accurate enough, nor deli- 
 cate enough, to express or trace the constant, 
 all-pervading influence of the finer and vaguer 
 shadows throughout Turner's works, that 
 thrilling influence which gives to the light 
 they leave, its passion and power. There is 
 not a stone, not a leaf, not a cloud, over 
 which light is not felt to be actually passing 
 and palpitating before our eyes. There is 
 the motion, the actual wave and radiation of 
 the darted beam — not the dull universal day- 
 light, which falls in the landscape without 
 life, or direction, or speculation, equal on all 
 things and dead on all things ; but the breath- 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 '27 
 
 ing, animated, exulting light, which feels, 
 and receives, and rejoices, and acts — which 
 chooses one thing and rejects another — 
 which seeks, and finds, and loses again — 
 leaping from rock to rock, from leaf to leaf, 
 from wave to wave, — glowing, or flashing, or 
 scintillating, according to what it strikes, or 
 in its holier moods, absorbing and enfolding 
 all things in the deep fulness of its repose, and 
 then again losing itself in bewilderment, and 
 doubt, and dimness ; or perishing and passing 
 away, entangled in drifting mist, or melted 
 into melancholy air, but still, — kindling, or 
 declining, sparkling or still, it is the living 
 light, which breathes in its deepest, most en- 
 tranced rest, which sleeps, but never dies. 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 4. 
 
 Whatever is an object of life, in whatever 
 may be infinitely and for itself desired, we 
 may be sure there is something of divine, 
 for God will not make anything an object of 
 
128 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 life to his creatures which does not point to 
 
 or partake of himself. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 5. 
 It would be inconsistent with God's infinite 
 perfection to work imperfectly in any place, 
 or in any matter ; wherefore we do not find 
 that flowers and fair trees, and kindly skies, 
 are given only where man may see them, 
 and be fed by them, but the Spirit of God 
 works everywhere alike, where there is no 
 eye to see, covering all lonely places with 
 an equal glory, using the pencil and out- 
 pouring the same splendor, in the caves of 
 the waters where the sea-snakes swim, and 
 in the desert where the satyrs dance, among 
 the fir-trees of the storks, and the rocks of 
 the conies, as among those higher creatures 
 whom he has made capable witnesses of his 
 
 working. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 August 6. 
 To handle the brush freely, and to paint 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 129 
 
 grass and weeds with accuracy enough to 
 satisfy the eye, are accomplishments which 
 a year or two's practice will give any man ; 
 but to trace among the grass and weeds those 
 mysteries of invention and combination, by 
 which nature appeals to the intellect — to 
 render the delicate fissure, and descending 
 curve, and undulating shadow of the mold- 
 ering soil, with gentle and fine finger, like 
 the touch of the rain itself — to find even in 
 all that appears most trifling or contempt- 
 ible, fresh evidence of the constant working 
 of the Divine power '* for glory and for 
 beauty," and to teach it and proclaim it to 
 the unthinking and the unregardless — this, 
 as it is the peculiar province and faculty of 
 the master-mind, so it is the peculiar duty 
 which is demanded of it by the Deity. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 7. 
 None are in the right road of real excel- 
 lence but those who are struggling to ren- 
 der the simplicity, purity, and inexhaustible 
 9 
 
I30 
 
 KUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 variety of nature's own chiaroscuro in open, 
 cloudless daylight, giving the expanse of 
 harmonious light — the speaking, decisive 
 shadow — and the exquisite grace, tenderness, 
 and grandeur of aerial opposition of local 
 color and equally illuminated lines. No 
 chiaroscuro is so difficult as this, and none 
 so noble, chaste, or impressive. 
 
 — Modern Painters, 
 
 August 8. 
 
 If, in our moments of utter idleness, we 
 turn to the sky as a last resource, which of 
 its phenomena do we speak of ? One says 
 it has been wet, and another it has been 
 windy, and another it has been warm. Who, 
 among the whole chattering crowd, can tell 
 me of the forms and the precipices of the 
 chain of tall white mountains that girded 
 the horizon at noon yesterday ? Who saw 
 the narrow sunbeam that came out of the 
 south, and smote upon their summits un- 
 til they melted and moldered away in a 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 131 
 
 dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance 
 of the dead clouds when the sunlight left 
 them last night, and the west wind blew them 
 before it like withered leaves? All has 
 passed, unregretted as unseen ; or if the 
 apathy be ever shaken off, even for an in- 
 stant, it is only by what is gross, or what is 
 
 extraordinary. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 9. 
 True taste is forever growing, learning, 
 reading, worshiping, laying its hand upon 
 its mouth because it is astonished, casting its 
 shoes from off its feet because it finds all 
 ground holy, lamenting over itself and test- 
 ing itself by the way that it fits things. And 
 it finds whereof to feed, and whereby to grow, 
 in all things, and therefore the complaint so 
 often made by young artists that they have 
 not within their reach materials, or subjects 
 enough for their fancy, is utterly groundless, 
 and the sign only of their own blindness and 
 inefficiency ; for there is that to be seen in 
 
132 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 every street and lane of every city, that to 
 be felt and found in every human heart and 
 countenance, that to be loved in every road- 
 side weed and moss-grown wall, which in the 
 hands of faithful men may convey emotions 
 of glory and sublimity continual and ex- 
 alted. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August io. 
 It is not in the broad and fierce manifest- 
 ations of the elemental energies, not in the 
 clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirl- 
 wind, that the highest characters of the 
 sublime are developed. God is not in the 
 earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still 
 small voice. They are but the blunt and the 
 low faculties of our nature, which can only be 
 addressed through lightning. It is in quiet 
 and subdued passages of unobtrusive maj- 
 esty, the deep, and the calm, and the per- 
 petual — that which must be sought ere it is 
 seen, and loved ere it is understood — things 
 which the angels work out for us daily, and 
 
RVSKIN VEAR-BOOk. 133 
 
 yet vary eternally, which are never wanting, 
 and never repeated, which are to be found 
 always, yet each found but once ; it is 
 through these that the lesson of devotion is 
 chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty 
 given. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 August ii. 
 
 The first step to the understanding 
 either the mind or position of a great man 
 ought, I think, to be an inquiry into the 
 elements of his early instruction, and the 
 mode in which he was affected by the cir- 
 cumstances of surrounding life. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 12. 
 
 Greatness of mind is not shown by ad- 
 mitting small things, but by making small 
 things great under its influence. He who 
 can take no interest in what is small, will 
 take false interest in what is great ; he who 
 
134 iiVSJCIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 cannot make a bank sublime, will make a 
 
 mountain ridiculous. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 13. 
 
 As far as I can judge of the ways of 
 men, it seems to me that the simplest and 
 most necessary truths are always the last 
 believed ; and I suppose that well-meaning 
 people in general would rather regulate their 
 conduct and creed by almost any other por- 
 tion of Scripture whatsoever, than by that 
 Sermon on the Mount, which contains the 
 things that Christ thought it first necessary 
 for all men to understand. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 14. 
 
 There is hardly a roadside pool or pond 
 which has not as much landscape in it as 
 above it. It is not the brown, muddy, dull 
 thing we suppose it to be ; it has a heart 
 like ourselves, and in the bottom of that 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 135 
 
 there are the boughs of the tall trees, and 
 the blades of the shaking grass, and all 
 manner of hues, of variable, pleasant light 
 out of the sky ; nay, the ugly gutter, that 
 stagnates over the drain bars, in the heart of 
 the foul city, is not altogether base ; down 
 in that, if you will look deep enough, you 
 may see the dark, serious blue of far-off sky, 
 and the passing of pure clouds. It is at 
 your own will that you see in that despised 
 stream either the refuse of the street or the 
 image of the sky — so it is with almost all 
 other things that we unkindly despise. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 August 15. 
 
 Gradually, thinking on from point to 
 point, we shall come to perceive that all true 
 happiness and nobleness are near us, and yet 
 neglected by us; and that till we have 
 learned how to be happy and noble, we have 
 not much to tell, even to red Indians. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
136 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 August 16. 
 Instead of supposing the love of nature 
 necessarily connected with the faithless- 
 ness of the age, I believe it is connected 
 properly with the benevolence and liberty of 
 the age ; that it is precisely the most healthy 
 element which distinctively belongs to us, 
 and that out of it, cultivated no longer in 
 levity or ignorance, but in earnestness and 
 as a duty, results will spring of an impor- 
 tance at present inconceivable ; and lights 
 arise, which, for the first time in man's 
 history, will reveal to him the true nature of 
 his life, the true field of his energies, and the 
 true relations between him and his Maker. 
 — Mode;rn Painters. 
 
 August 17. 
 One lesson we are invariably taught by 
 Turner's pictures, however viewed or ap- 
 proached, — that the work of the Great 
 Spirit of nature is as deep and unapproach- 
 able in the lowest as in the noblest objects, — 
 that the Divine mind is as visible in its full 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 137 
 
 energy of operation on every lowly bank 
 and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the 
 pillars of heaven, and settling the foundation 
 of the earth; and that to the rightly per- 
 ceiving mind, there is the same infinity, the 
 same majesty, the same power, the same 
 unity, and the same perfection, manifest in 
 the casting of the clay as in the scattering of 
 the cloud, in the mouldering of the dust, as 
 in the kindling of the day star. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 18. 
 
 A FOOL always wants to shorten space 
 and time: a wise man wants to lengthen 
 both. A fool wants to kill space and kill 
 time ; a wise man, first to gain them, then to 
 animate them. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 August 19. 
 
 People will discover at last that royal 
 roads to anywhere can no more be laid in 
 
138 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 iron than they can in dust ; that there are, 
 
 in fact, no royal roads to anywhere worth 
 
 going to ; that, if there were, it would that 
 
 instant cease to be worth going to, — I mean 
 
 so far as the things to be obtained are in any 
 
 way estimable in terms of price. For there 
 
 are two classes of precious things in the 
 
 world : those that God gives us for nothing 
 
 — sun, air, and life (both mortal life and 
 
 immortal) ; and the secondarily precious 
 
 things, worldly wine and milk, can only be 
 
 bought for definite money ; they never can 
 
 be cheapened. No cheating or bargaining 
 
 will ever get a single thing out of nature's 
 
 ** establishment " at half price. Do we want 
 
 to be strong? — we must work. To be 
 
 hungry ? — we must starve. To be happy ? 
 
 — we must be kind. To be wise ? — we must 
 
 look and think. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 20. 
 
 It does a bullet no good to go fast ; and 
 a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 139 
 
 go slow ; for his glory is not at all in going, 
 but in being. 
 
 —Modern Paintsrs. 
 
 August 21. 
 
 God paints the clouds and shapes the 
 moss-fibers, that men may be happy in see- 
 ing Him at His work, and that in resting 
 quietly beside Him, and watching His 
 working, and — according to the power He 
 has communicated to ourselves, and the 
 guidance He grants — in carrying out His 
 purposes of peace and charity among all His 
 creatures, are the only real happiness that 
 ever were, or will be, possible to mankind. 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 22. 
 
 Great art is precisely that which never 
 was, nor will be taught, it is pre-eminently 
 and finally the expression of the spirits of 
 great men. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
140 RUSKIN YEAk-BOOJC. 
 
 August 23. 
 More, I think, has always been done for 
 God by few words than by many pictures, 
 and more by few acts than many words. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 August 24. 
 Of all the forms of pride and vanity, as 
 there are none more subtle, so I believe 
 there are none more sinful, than those which 
 are manifested by the Pharisees of art. To 
 be proud of birth, of place, of wit, of bodily 
 beauty, is comparatively innocent, just be- 
 cause such pride is more natural, and more 
 easily detected. But to be proud of our 
 sanctities ; to pour contempt upon our fel- 
 lows, because, forsooth, we like to look at 
 Madonnas in bowers of roses, better than 
 at plain pictures of plain things ; and to 
 make this religious art of ours the expression 
 of our own perpetual self-complacency, — con- 
 gratulating ourselves, day by day, on our 
 purities, properties, elevations, and inspira- 
 tions, as above the reach of common 
 
RUSKTN YEAR-BOOK. 141 
 
 mortals, — this I believe to be one of the 
 
 wickedest and foolishest forms of human 
 
 egotism. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 August 25. 
 The observer who has accustomed him- 
 self to take human faces as God made them, 
 will often find as much beauty on a village 
 green as in the proudest room of state, and 
 as much in the free seats of a church aisle 
 as in all the sacred paintings of the Vatican 
 
 or the Pitti. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 26. 
 Our best finishing is but coarse and 
 blundering work after all. We may smooth, 
 and soften, and sharpen, till we are sick at 
 heart ; but take a good magnifying glass to 
 our miracle of skill, and the invisible edge is 
 a jagged saw, and the silky thread a rugged 
 cable, and the soft surface a granite desert. 
 Let all the ingenuity and all the art of the 
 
142 
 
 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 human race be brought to bear upon the 
 attainment of the utmost possible finish, and 
 they could not do what is done in the foot 
 of a fly, or the film of a bubble. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 27. 
 
 I BELIEVE the first test of a truly great 
 man is his humility. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 28. 
 
 The true Seer always feels as intensely 
 
 as any one else; but he does not much 
 
 describe his feelings. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 God never imposes a duty without giv- 
 ing time to do it. 
 
 — Lectures on Architecture and Painting. 
 
 August 29. 
 But when the active life is nobly ful- 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 143 
 
 filled, and the mind is then raised beyond it 
 into clear and calm beholding of the world 
 around us, the same tendency manifests 
 itself in the most sacred way ; the simplest 
 forms of nature are strangely animated by 
 the sense of the Divine presence ; the trees 
 and flowers seem all, in a sort, children of 
 God ; and we ourselves, their fellows, made 
 out of the same dust, and greater than they 
 only in having a greater portion of the 
 Divine power exerted in our frame, and all 
 the common uses and palpably visible forms 
 of things, become subordinate in our minds 
 to their inner glory, to the mysterious 
 voices in which they talk to us about God, 
 and the changeful and typical aspects by 
 which they witness to us of holy truth, and 
 fill us with obedient, joyful, and thankful 
 emotion. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 August 30. 
 And not only in the material and in the 
 course, but yet more earnestly in the spirit 
 
144 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 of it, let a girl's education be as serious as a 
 
 boy's. You bring up your girls as if they 
 
 were meant for sideboard ornaments, and 
 
 then complain of their frivolity. Give them 
 
 the same advantages that you give their 
 
 brothers ; appeal to the same grand instincts 
 
 of virtue in them; teach themy also, that 
 
 courage and truth are the pillars of their 
 
 being. 
 
 —Sesame and L11.1ES. 
 
 " Work while you have the light," espe- 
 cially the light of morning. The happiness 
 of your life, and its power, and its part and 
 rank in earth or in heaven, depend on the 
 way you pass your days now. They are 
 not^to be sad days ; far from that, the first 
 duty of young people is to be delighted and 
 delightful ; but they are to be in the deepest 
 sense solemn days. Now, therefore, see 
 that no day passes in which you do not 
 make yourself a somewhat better creature. 
 — Sesame and i^ii^ies, 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 145 
 
 August 31. 
 All men who have sense and feeling are 
 being continually helped; they are taught 
 by every person whom they meet, and en- 
 riched by everything that falls in their way. 
 The greatest is he who has been oftenest 
 aided ; and, if the attainments of all human 
 minds could be traced to their real sources, 
 it would be found that the world had been 
 laid most under contribution by the men of 
 most original power, and that every day of 
 their existence deepened their debt to their 
 race, while it enlarged their gifts to it. The 
 labor devoted to trace the origin of any 
 thought, or invention, will usually issue in 
 the blank conclusion that there is nothing 
 new under the sun ; yet nothing that is truly 
 great can ever be altogether borrowed ; and 
 he is commonly the wisest, and is always the 
 happiest, who receives simply, and without 
 envious question, whatever good is offered 
 him, with thanks to its immediate giver. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 10 
 
September. 
 
 O, Autumn ! marvelous painter, every hue 
 Of thy immortal pencil is steeped through 
 With essence of Divinity ! 
 
 — Paui, Hamii^ton Haynks. 
 
 146 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 147 
 
 September x. 
 
 Gather a single blade of grass, and ex- 
 amine for a minute, quietly, its narrow 
 sword-shaped strip of fluted green. Nothing, 
 as it seems there, of notable goodness or 
 beauty. A very little strength, and a very 
 little tallness, and a few delicate, long lines 
 meeting in a point — not a perfect point 
 either, but blunt and unfinished, by no 
 means a creditable, or apparently a much- 
 cared-for example of nature's workmanship, 
 made only to be trodden on to-day, and to- 
 morrow to be cast into the oven ; and a little 
 pale and hollow stalk, feeble and flaccid, 
 leading down to the dull brown fibers of 
 roots. And yet, think of it well, and judge 
 whether of all the gorgeous flowers that 
 beam in summer air, and of all the strong 
 and goodly trees — stately palm and pine, 
 strong ash and oak, scented citron and 
 
148 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 burdened vine — there be any by man so 
 deeply loved, by God so highly graced, as 
 that narrow point of feeble green. And 
 well does it fulfil its mission. Consider 
 what we owe merely to the meadow grass, 
 to the covering of the dark ground by that 
 glorious enamel, by the companies of those 
 soft, and countless, and peaceful spears ; . . . 
 all spring and summer is in them — the walks 
 by silent, scented paths — the rests in noon- 
 day heats — the joy of herds and flocks — the 
 power of all shepherd life and meditation — 
 the life of sunlight upon the world, falling 
 in emerald streaks, and falling in soft blue 
 shadows, where else it would have struck 
 upon the dark mould, or scorching heat. 
 — MoDKRN Paintbrs. 
 
 September 2. 
 
 Do you think you can know yourself by 
 looking into yourself? Never. You can 
 know what you are only by looking out of 
 yourself. 
 
 —Ethics of th« Dust, 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 149 
 
 September 3. 
 And, for all of us, the question is not at 
 all to ascertain how much or how little cor- 
 ruption there is in human nature; but to 
 ascertain whether, out of all the mass of that 
 nature, we are of the sheep or the goat 
 breed; whether we are people of upright 
 heart, being shot at, or people of crooked 
 heart, shooting. And, of all the texts bear- 
 ing on the subject, this, which is^a quite 
 simple and practical order, is the one you 
 have chiefly to hold in mind. Keep thy 
 heart with all diligence, for out of it are the 
 issues of life. 
 
 —Ethics of thk Dust. 
 
 September 4. 
 " The constant duty of every man to his 
 fellows is to ascertain his own powers and 
 special gifts, and to strengthen them for the 
 help of others." 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 September 5. 
 " The essential idea of real virtue is that 
 
150 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 of a vital human strength which, instinc- 
 tively, constantly, and without motive, does 
 
 what is right." 
 
 - r-'^" — Ethics op the Dust. 
 
 September 6. 
 
 " There is but one way in which man can 
 
 ever help God — that is, by letting God help 
 
 him : and there is no way in which his name 
 
 is more guiltily taken in vain than by 
 
 calling the abandonment of our work the 
 
 performance of his." 
 
 —Ethics of ths Dust. 
 
 September 7. 
 ** No picture can be good which deceives 
 by its imitation, for the very reason that 
 nothing can be beautiful which is not true." 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 September 8. 
 " Let the reader imagine, first, the appear- 
 ance of the most varied plain of some richly 
 cultivated country ; let him imagine it dark 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 151 
 
 with graceful woods and soft with deepest 
 pastures ; let him fill the space of it, to the 
 utmost horizon, with innumerable and change- 
 ful incidents of scenery and life ; leading 
 pleasant streamlets through its meadows, 
 strewing clusters of cottages beside their 
 banks, tracing sweet footpaths through its 
 avenues, and animating its fields with happy- 
 flocks and slow wandering spots of cattle ; 
 and when he has wearied himself with endless 
 imagining, and left no space without some 
 loveliness of its own, let him conceive all this 
 great plain, with its infinite treasures of 
 natural beauty and happy human life, 
 gathered up in God's hands from one edge 
 of the horizon to the other like a woven 
 garment, and shaken into deep, falling folds, 
 as the robes droop from a king's shoulders ; 
 all its bright rivers leaping into cataracts 
 along the hollows of its fall, and all its forests 
 rearing themselves aslant against its slopes, 
 as a rider rears himself back when his horse 
 plunges ; and all its villages nestling them- 
 selves into the new windings of its glens ; 
 
152 R us KIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 and all its pastures thrown into steep waves of 
 greensward dashed with dew along the edges 
 of their folds, and sweeping down into endless 
 slopes, with a cloud here and there lying 
 quietly, half on the grass, half in the air ; 
 and he will have as yet, in all this lifted 
 world, only the foundation of one of the 
 great Alps. And whatever is lovely in the 
 lowland scenery becomes lovelier in this 
 change: the trees which grow heavily and 
 stiffly from the level line of plain assume 
 strange curves of strength and grace as they 
 bend themselves against the mountain side ; 
 they breathe more freely, and toss their 
 branches more carelessly as each climbs 
 higher, looking to the clear light above the 
 topmost leaves of its brother tree: the 
 flowers which on the arable plain fell before 
 the plow, now find out for themselves 
 unapproachable places, where year by year 
 they gather into happier fellowship and tear 
 no evil ; and the streams which in the level 
 land crept in dark eddies by unwholsome 
 banks, now move in showers of silver, and 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 153 
 
 are clothed with rainbows, and bring health 
 and life wherever the glance of their waves 
 
 can reach.'* 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 September 9. 
 
 " The proof of a thing's being right is, that 
 it has a power over the heart : that it excites 
 us, wins us, or helps us." 
 
 — Lectures on Architecture. 
 
 September 10. 
 
 " We treat God with irreverence by 
 banishing him from our thoughts, not by 
 referring to his will on slight occasions." 
 —The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 
 
 September ii. 
 
 " A GREAT artist is just like a wise and 
 hospitable man with a small house : the 
 large companies of truths, like guests, are 
 waiting his invitation, he wisely chooses 
 from among this crowd the guests who will 
 
154 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 be happiest with each other, making those 
 whom he receives thoroughly comfortable, 
 and kindly remembering even those whom 
 he excludes ; while the foolish host, trying 
 to receive all, leaves a large part of his 
 company on the staircase, without even 
 knowing who is there, and destroys, by 
 inconsistent fellowship, the pleasure of those 
 who gain entrance." 
 
 —Modern Painters- 
 
 September 12. 
 
 Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, 
 
 color is the hoHest, the most divine, the 
 
 most solemn. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 September 13. 
 Self-command is often thougiit a char- 
 acteristic of high breeding. ... A true 
 gentlemen has no need of self command ; he 
 simply feels rightly in all directions, on all 
 occasions, and desiring to express only so 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 155 
 
 much of his feeling as it is right to express, 
 does not need to command himself. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 September 14. 
 Such help as we can give each other in 
 this world is a debt to each other, and the 
 man who perceives a superiority or a capac- 
 ity in a subordinate, and neither confesses 
 nor assists it, is not merely the withholder 
 of kindness, but the committer of injury. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 September 15. 
 All men, completely organized and 
 justly tempered, enjoy color ; it is meant for 
 the perpetual comfort and delight of the 
 human heart ; it is richly bestowed on the 
 highest works of creation, and the eminent 
 sign and seal of perfection in them ; being 
 associated with life in the human body, 
 with light in the sky, with purity and hard- 
 ness in the earth— death, night, and pollu- 
 tion of all kinds being colorless. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
156 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 September 16. 
 To myself, mountains are the beginning 
 and the end of all natural scenery ; in them, 
 and in the forms of inferior landscape that 
 lead to them, my affections are wholly bound 
 up ; and though I can look with happy ad- 
 miration at all the lowland flowers, and 
 woods, and open skies, the happiness is 
 tranquil and cold, like that of examining 
 detached flowers in a conservatory, or read- 
 ing a pleasant book ; and if the scenery be 
 resolutely level, insisting upon the declara- 
 tion of its own flatness in all the detail of 
 it, as in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or Central 
 Lombardy, it appears to me like a prison, 
 and I cannot long endure it. But the 
 slightest rise and fall in the road — a mossy 
 bank at the side of a crag of chalk, with 
 brambles at its brow, overhanging it — a 
 ripple over three or four stones in the stream 
 by the bridge — above all, a wild bit of ferny 
 ground under a fir or two, looking as if, 
 possibly, one might see a hill if one got to 
 the other side of the tree, will instantly give 
 
RUSKTN YEAR-BOOK. 157 
 
 me intense delight, because the shadow, or 
 the hope, of the hills is in them. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 September 17. 
 There are good books for the hour, and 
 good ones for all time; bad books for the 
 hour, and bad ones for all time. 
 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 September 18. 
 We are all of us willing enough to accept 
 dead truths, or blunt ones, which can be 
 fitted harmoniously into spare niches, or 
 shrouded and coffined at once, out of the 
 way, we holding complacently the cemetery 
 keys and supposing we have learned some- 
 thing. But a sapling truth, with earth at its 
 root and blossoms in its branches; or a 
 trenchant truth, that can cut its way through 
 bars and sods; most men, it seems to me, 
 dislike the sight or entertainment of, if by 
 any means such guest or vision may be 
 
158 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 avoided. And, indeed, this is no wonder; 
 for one such truth, thoroughly accepted, 
 connects itself strangely with others, and 
 there is no saying what it may lead to. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 September 19. 
 Great art is nothing less than the ex- 
 pression of a great soul ; and great souls are 
 not common things. 
 
 — Poi^iTiCAi, Economy of Art. 
 
 September 20. 
 All men are men of genius in their 
 degree — rivulets or rivers, it does not matter, 
 so that the souls be clean and pure ; not 
 dead walls encompassing dead heaps of 
 things, known and numbered, but running 
 waters in the sweet wilderness of things un- 
 numbered and unknown, conscious only of 
 the living banks, on which they partly 
 refresh and partly reflect the flowers, and so 
 
 pass on. 
 
 — Th« Stones of Venicb. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 159 
 
 September 21. 
 God shows us in himself, strange as it 
 may seem, not only authoritative perfection, 
 but even the perfection of obedience — an 
 obedience to his own laws ; and in the cum- 
 brous movement of those unwieldliest of his 
 creatures we are reminded, even in his divine 
 essence, of that attribute of uprightness in 
 the human creature "that sweareth to his 
 own hurt and changeth not." 
 
 — The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 
 
 September 22. 
 " Every painter ought to paint what he 
 himself loves, not what others have loved. 
 If his mind be pure and sweetly toned, what 
 he loves will be lovely ; if otherwise, no ex- 
 ample can guide his selection, no precept 
 
 govern his hand." 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 September 23. 
 
 " Knowledge is like current coin. A 
 man may have some right to be proud of 
 
i6o RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 possessing it, if he has worked for the gold 
 
 of it, and stamped it, so that it may be 
 
 received of all men as true, or earned it fairly, 
 
 being already assayed, but if he has done 
 
 none of these things, but only had it thrown 
 
 in his face by a passer-by, what cause has he 
 
 to be proud?" 
 
 —The Stonks of Vknicb. 
 
 September 24. 
 
 ** Nothing must come between nature and 
 the artist's sight, nothing between God and 
 the artist's soul." 
 
 —The Stones oe Venice. 
 
 September 25. 
 
 " It makes no difference to some men 
 whether a natural object be large or small, 
 whether it be strong or feeble. But loveli- 
 ness of color, perfectness of form, endlessness 
 of change, wonderfulness of structure, are 
 precious to all undiseased minds; and the 
 superiority of the mountains in all these 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. i6l 
 
 things to the lowland is as measurable as the 
 richness of a painted window matched with 
 a white one, or the wealth of a museum com- 
 pared with a simply furnished chamber. 
 They seem to have been built for the human 
 race, as at once their schools and cathedrals ; 
 full of treasures of illuminated manuscript 
 for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to 
 the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the 
 thinker, glorious in holiness for the wor- 
 shiper." 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 September 26. 
 "The apathy which cannot perceive 
 beauty is very different from the stern energy 
 which disdains it ; and the coldness of heart 
 which receives no emotion from external 
 nature is not to be confounded with the 
 wisdom of purpose which represses emotion 
 in action. In the case of most men, it is 
 neither acuteness of the reason, nor breadth 
 of humanity, which shields them from impres- 
 sions of natural scenery, but rather low anxi- 
 II 
 
i62 RUSKJN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 eties, vain discontents, and mean pleasures ; 
 and for one who is blinded to the works of 
 God by profound abstraction or lofty pur- 
 pose, tens of thousands have their eyes sealed 
 by vulgar selfishness, and their intelligence 
 crushed by impious care." 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 September 27. 
 
 " There is no solemnity so deep, to a 
 right-thinking creature, as that of dawn." 
 —Sesame and Liues. 
 
 " Never depend upon your genius ; if you 
 have talent, industry will improve it ; if you 
 have none, industry will supply the defi- 
 ciency." 
 
 September 28. 
 
 " Most men do not know what is in them 
 till they receive that summons from their 
 fellows ; their hearts die within them, sleep 
 settles upon them — the lethargy of the 
 world's miasmata; there is nothing for 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 163 
 
 which they are so thankful as for that cry, 
 * Awake thou that sleepest." 
 
 — Ths Stones of Venice. 
 
 September 29. 
 " When we build, let us think we build 
 (public edifices) forever. Let it not be for 
 the present delight, nor for present use alone, 
 let it be such work as our descendants will 
 thank us for ; and let us think, as we lay 
 stone on stone, that a time is to come when 
 those stones will be held revered because 
 our own hands have touched them, and that 
 men will say as they look upon the labor 
 and wrought substances of them, ' See ! this 
 our fathers did for us.' " 
 
 —The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 
 
 September 30. 
 This kingdom it is not in our power to 
 bring; but it is to receive. . . . The choice 
 is no vague or doubtful one. High on the 
 desert mountain, full descried, sits the 
 throned tempter, with his promise — the 
 
i64 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 kingdoms of this world, and the glory of 
 them. He still calls you to your labor, as 
 Christ to your rest — labor and sorrow, base 
 desire, and cruel hope. So far as you desire 
 to possess, rather than to give ; so far as 
 you look for power to command, instead of 
 to bless ; so far as your own prosperity 
 seems to you to issue out of contest or 
 rivalry, of any kind, with other men, or other 
 nations ; so long as the hope before you is 
 for supremacy, instead of love, and your 
 desire is to be greatest, instead of least — 
 first, instead of last — so long you are serv- 
 ing the Lord of all that is last, and least ; — 
 the last enemy that shall be destroyed — 
 Death ; and you shall have death's crime, 
 with the worm coiled in it ; and death's wages, 
 with the worm feeding on them ; kindred of 
 the earth shall you yourself become ; saying 
 to the grave, " Thou art my father ; " and to 
 the worm, " Thou art my mother and my 
 sister.** I leave you to judge, and to choose, 
 between this labor and the bequeathed 
 peace ; this wages and the gift of the Morn- 
 
kUSkm YEAR-BOOK, 165 
 
 ing Star ; this obedience and the doing of the 
 will which shall enable you to claim another 
 kindred than of the earth, and to hear an- 
 other voice than that of the grave, saying, 
 ** My brother, and sister, and mother." 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
©ctober* 
 
 There is a beautiful spirit breathing now 
 Its mellowed richness on the clustered trees, 
 And, from a beaker full of richest dyes, 
 Pouring new glory on the Autumn woods, 
 And dipping in warm light the pillared 
 
 clouds. 
 Morn on the mountain, like a summer bird. 
 Lifts up her purple wing, and in the vales 
 The gentle wind, a sweet and passionate 
 
 wooer. 
 Kisses the blushing leaf, and stirs up life. 
 Within the solemn woods of ash deep- 
 crimsoned. 
 And silver beech, and maple yellow-leaved. 
 Where Autumn, like a faint old man, sits 
 
 down 
 By the wayside a-weary. Through the trees 
 The golden robin moves. The purple finch, 
 That on wild cherry and red cedar feeds, 
 A winter bird, comes with his plaintive 
 whistle, 
 1 66 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 167 
 
 And pecks by the witch-hazel, whilst aloud 
 
 From cottage roofs the warbling blue-bird 
 
 sings, 
 
 And, merrily, with oft-repeated stroke, 
 
 Sounds from the threshing-floor the busy 
 
 flail. 
 
 —Henry Wadswqrth Longfei,i,ow. 
 
1 68 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOIC. 
 
 October i. 
 The right Christian mind will find it? 
 own image wherever it exists ; it will seek 
 for what it loves, and draw it out of all dens 
 and caves, and it will believe in its being 
 often when it cannot see it, and always turn 
 away its eyes from beholding vanity ; and 
 so it will lie lovingly over all the faults and 
 rough places of the human heart, as the snow 
 from heaven does over the hard and bleak 
 and broken mountain rocks, following their 
 forms truly, and yet catching light for them 
 to make them fair, and that must be a steep 
 and unkindly crag indeed which it cannot 
 cover. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 October 2. 
 What length and severity of labor may 
 be ultimately found necessary for the pro- 
 curing of the due comforts of life, I do not 
 
kUSKIN YEAR-BOOk. 169 
 
 know ; neither what degree of refinement it 
 is possible to unite with the so-called servile 
 occupation of life; but this I know, that 
 right economy of labor will, as it is under- 
 stood, assign to each man as much as will be 
 healthy for him, and no more ; and that no 
 refinements are desirable which cannot be 
 connected with toil. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 October 3. 
 Flowers seem intended for the solace 
 of ordinary humanity. Children love them ; 
 quiet, tender, contented, ordinary people 
 love them as they grow ; luxurious and dis- 
 orderly people rejoice in them gathered. 
 They are the cottager's treasure ; and in the 
 crowded town, mark, as with a little broken 
 fragment of rainbow, the windows of the 
 workers in whose heart rests the covenant of 
 peace. Passionate or religious minds con- 
 template them with fond, feverish intensity. 
 ... To the child and the girl, the peasant 
 and the manufacturing operative, to the 
 
1^0 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 grisette and the nun, the lover and the 
 
 monk, they are precious always. But to the 
 
 men of supreme power and thoughtfulness, 
 
 precious only at times ; symbolically and 
 
 pathetically often to the poets, but rarely for 
 
 their own sake. They fall, forgotten, from 
 
 the great workman's and soldier's hands. 
 
 Such men will take in thankfulness, crowns 
 
 of leaves, or crowns of thorns — not crowns 
 
 of flowers. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 October 4. 
 The largest part of things happening in 
 practical life are brought about with no 
 deliberate purpose. There are always a 
 number of people who have the nature of 
 stones ; they fall on other persons and crush 
 them. Some again have the nature of weeds, 
 and twist about other people's feet and en- 
 tangle them. More have the nature of logs, 
 and lie in the way, so that every one falls 
 over them. And most of all have the nature 
 of thorns, and set themselves by waysides, 
 
kt/SkJAT YEAR-BOOk. 17 i 
 
 SO that every passer-by must be torn, and all 
 good seed choked ; or perhaps make wonder- 
 ful crackling under various pots, even to the 
 extent of practically boiling water and 
 working pistons. All these people produce 
 immense and sorrowful effect in the world ; 
 yet none of them are doers; it is their 
 nature to crush, impede, prick ; but deed is 
 not in them. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 October 5. 
 No words that I know of will say what 
 these mosses are. None are delicate enough, 
 none perfect enough, none rich enough. 
 How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of 
 furred and beaming green — the starred divis- 
 ions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the 
 Rock Spirits could spin porphyry as we do 
 glass— the traceries of intricate silver, fringes 
 of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished 
 through every fiber into fitful brightness and 
 glossy traverses of silken change, yet all sub- 
 dued and pensive, and formed for simplest, 
 
iyi ktJSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 sweetest offices of grace ! They will not be 
 gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet or 
 love-token ; but of these the wild bird will 
 make its nest, and the wearied child his pil- 
 low. And, as the earth's first mercy, so they 
 are its last gift to us. When all other ser- 
 vice is vain from plant and tree, the soft 
 mosses and gray lichen take up their watch 
 by the head-stone. The woods, the blos- 
 soms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done 
 their parts for a time, but these do service 
 forever. Trees for the builder's yard, flow- 
 ers for the bride's chamber, corn for the 
 granary, moss for the grave. Yet as in one 
 sense the humblest, in another they are the 
 most honored of the earth-children. Un- 
 fading, as motionless the worm frets them 
 not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in 
 lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor 
 pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered, con- 
 stant-hearted, is intrusted the weaving of 
 the dark, eternal tapestries of the hills ; to 
 them, slow-penciled, iris-eyed, the tender 
 framing of their endless imagery. Sharing 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 »73 
 
 the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they 
 share also its endurance ; and while the winds 
 of departing spring scatter the white haw- 
 thorn blossom like drifted snow, and sum- 
 mer dims in the parched meadow the 
 drooping cowslip-gold, far above, among 
 the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, 
 star-like, on the stone ; and the gathering 
 orange stain upon the edge of yonder 
 western peak reflects the sunsets of a thou- 
 sand years. 
 
 — MoDSRN Painters. 
 
 October 6. 
 No false person can paint. A person 
 false at heart may, when it suits his purposes, 
 seize a stray truth here or there ; but the 
 relations of truth — its perfectness — that 
 which makes it wholesome truth, he can 
 never perceive. As wholeness and whole- 
 someness go together, so also sight with sin- 
 cerity ; it is only the constant desire of, and 
 submissiveness to, truth which can measure 
 its strange angles and mark its infinite 
 
174 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 aspects, and fit them and knit them into the 
 strength of sacred invention. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 October 7. 
 The essence of lying is in deception, not 
 in words ; a lie may be told by silence, by 
 equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by 
 a glance of the eye attaching a peculiar sig- 
 nificance to a sentence ; and all these kinds 
 of lies are worse and baser by many degrees 
 than a He plainly worded ; so that no form of 
 blinded conscience is so far sunk as that 
 which comforts itself for having deceived, 
 because the deception was by gesture or si- 
 lence, instead of utterance ; and finally, ac- 
 cording to Tennyson's deep and trenchant 
 line, *' A lie which is half a truth is ever the 
 
 worst of lies. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 October 8. 
 Men are merely on a lower or higher 
 stage of eminence, whose summit is God's 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 175 
 
 throne, infinitely above all ; and there is just 
 as much reason for the wisest as for the sim- 
 plest man being discontented with his posi- 
 tion, as respects the real quantity of knowl- 
 edge he possesses. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 October 9. 
 
 But this poor miserable me ! Is thisy then, 
 all the book I have got to read about God 
 in ? Yes, truly so. No other book, nor 
 fragment of book, than that, will you ever 
 find ; — no velvet-bound missal, nor frank- 
 incensed manuscript ; — nothing hieroglyphic 
 nor cunic form ; papyrus and pyramid are 
 alike silent in this matter ; — nothing in the 
 clouds above, nor in the earth beneath. That 
 flesh-bound volume is the only revelation 
 that is, that was, or that can be. In that is 
 the image of God painted ; in that is the law 
 of God written ; in that is the promise of 
 God revealed. Know thyself; for through 
 thyself only thou canst know God. 
 
 r-'MoDERN Paintehs. 
 
176 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 October 10. 
 
 If it is the love of that which your work 
 
 represents ; if being a landscape painter, it 
 
 is love of hills and trees that moves you ; if, 
 
 being a figure painter, it is love of human 
 
 beauty and human soul that moves you ; if, 
 
 being a flower or animal painter, it is love, 
 
 and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb 
 
 that moves you, then the spirit is upon you, 
 
 and the earth is yours and the fulness 
 
 thereof. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 October ii. 
 The whole function of the artist in the 
 world is to be a seeing and a feeling creature ; 
 to be an instrument of such tenderness and 
 sensitiveness that no shadow, no hue, no line, 
 no instantaneous and evanescent expression 
 of the visible thing around him, nor any of 
 the emotions which they are capable of con- 
 veying to the spirit which has been given 
 him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade 
 from the book of record. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 77 
 
 October 12. 
 It was wild weather when I left Rome, 
 and all across the Campagna the clouds were 
 sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of 
 thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun 
 along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up 
 the infinity of its arches like the bridge of 
 chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of 
 the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to 
 the north, and the noble outline of the 
 domes of Albano and graceful darkness of 
 its ilex groves rose against pure streaks of 
 alternate blue and amber, the upper sky 
 gradually flushing through the last fragments 
 of rain cloud in deep palpitating azure, half 
 ether and half dew. The noonday sun came 
 slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia 
 and its masses of entangled and tall foliage, 
 whose autumnal tints were mixed with the 
 wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were 
 penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot 
 call it color, it was conflagration. Purple, 
 and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of 
 God's tabernacles, the rejoicing trees sank 
 12 
 
178 R us KIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 into the valley in showers of light, every 
 separate leaf quivering with buoyant and 
 burning life ; each, as it turned to reflect or 
 to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and 
 then an emerald. Far up into the recesses 
 of the valley, the green vistas arched like 
 the hollows of mighty waves of some crys- 
 talline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed 
 along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes 
 of orange spray tossed into the air around 
 them, breaking over the gray walls of rock into 
 a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling 
 alternately as the weak wind lifted and let 
 them fall. Every glade of grass burned like 
 the golden floor of heaven, opening in sud- 
 den gleams as the foliage broke and closed 
 above it, as sheet lightning opens in a cloud 
 at sunset ; the motionless masses of dark 
 rock — dark though flushed with scarlet lichen 
 — casting their quiet shadows across its rest- 
 less radiance, the fountain underneath them 
 filling its marble hollow with blue mist and 
 fitful sound, and over all the multitudinous 
 bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 179 
 
 that have no darkness, and only exist to 
 illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals 
 between the solemn and orbed repose of the 
 stone pines, passing to lose themselves in 
 the last, white, blinding luster of the meas- 
 ureless line where the Campagna melted into 
 
 the blaze of the sea. 
 
 — ^Modern Painters. 
 
 October 13. 
 It is evident that even the ordinary ex- 
 ercise of charity implies a condition of the 
 whole moral being in some measure right 
 and healthy, and that to the entire exercise 
 of it there is necessary the entire perfection 
 of the Christian character, for he who loves 
 not God, nor his brother, cannot love the 
 grass beneath his feet and the creatures that 
 fill those spaces in the universe which he 
 needs not, and which live not for his uses; 
 nay, he has seldom grace to be grateful even 
 to those that love him and serve him ; while, 
 on the other hand, none can love God nor his 
 human brother without loving all things 
 
i8o RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 which his Father loves, nor without looking 
 upon them, every one, as in that respect his 
 brethren also, and perhaps worthier than he, 
 if in the under concords they have to fill, 
 their part is touched more truly. Wherefore 
 it is good to read of that kindness and hum- 
 bleness of St. Francis of Assisi, who never 
 spoke to bird nor cicala, nor even to wolf 
 and beast of prey , but as his brother. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 October 14. 
 It is, indeed, right that we should look 
 for, and hasten, so far as in us lies, the com- 
 ing of the day of God ; but not that we 
 should check any human effort by anticipa- 
 tion of its approach. We should hasten it 
 best by endeavoring to work out the tasks 
 that are appointed for us here, and, there- 
 fore, reasoning as if the world were to con- 
 tinue under its existing dispensation, and 
 the powers which have just been granted to 
 us were to be continued through myriads of 
 
 future ages. 
 
 —The Stones oe Venice. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, i8i 
 
 October 15. 
 There is nothing so small but that we 
 may honor God by asking his guidance of it, 
 or insult Him by taking it into our own 
 hands; and what is true of the Deity is 
 equally true of his revelation. 
 
 — Thb Seven Lamps of Architecture. 
 
 October 16. 
 There is nothing so great or so godly 
 in creation but that it is a mean symbol of 
 the Gospel of Christ, and of the things he 
 has prepared for them that love him. 
 
 —The stones of Venice. 
 
 October 17. 
 Time is scytheless and toothless ; it is we 
 who gnaw like the worm, we who smite like 
 the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish, our- 
 selves who consume ; we are the mildew and 
 the flame, and the soul of a man is to its 
 own works as the moth that frets when it 
 cannot fly, and as the hidden flame where it 
 
 cannot illumine. 
 
 —Poi^iTiCAi. Economy of Art. 
 
l82 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 October i8. 
 
 It is not weariness of mortality, but the 
 strength of divinity, which we have to recog- 
 nize in all mighty things ; and that is just 
 what we now never recognize, but think that 
 we are to do great things by help of iron 
 bars and perspiration. Alas I we shall do 
 nothing that way but lose some weight. 
 
 — Prk-Raphaeutism. 
 
 October 19. 
 
 Stand for half an hour beside the fall 
 of Schaffhausen, on the north side, where 
 the rapids are long, and watch how the vault 
 of water first bends, unbroken, in pure, 
 polished velocity, over the arching rocks at 
 the brow of the cataract — covering them 
 with a dome of crystal twenty feet thick — 
 so swift that its motion is unseen except 
 when a foam globe from above darts over it 
 like a falling star; and how the trees are 
 lighted above, under all their leaves, at the 
 instant that it breaks into foam ; and how 
 
HUSJCIN YEAR-BOOK. 183 
 
 all the hollows of that foam burn with green 
 fire, like so much shattering chrysoprase ; 
 and how, ever and anon, startling you with 
 its white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing 
 out of the fall like a rocket, bursting in the 
 wind and driven away in dust, filling the air 
 with light ; and how, through the curdling 
 wreaths of the restless, crashing abyss below, 
 the blue of the water, paled by the foam in 
 its body, shows purer than the sky through 
 white rain-cloud ; while the shuddering iris 
 stoops in tremulous stillness over all, fading 
 and flushing alternately through the chok- 
 ing spray and shattered sunshine, hiding it- 
 self at last among the thick golden leaves 
 which toss to and fro in sympathy with the 
 wild water ; their dripping masses lifted at 
 intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by 
 some stronger gust from the cataract, and 
 bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its 
 roar dies away ; the dew gushing from their 
 thick branches through drooping clusters of 
 emerald herbage, and sparkling in white 
 threads along the dark rocks of the shore, 
 
i84 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 feeding the lichens which chase and checker 
 them with purple and silver. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 October 20. 
 You knock a man into a ditch, and then 
 you tell him to remain content in the " posi- 
 tion in which Providence has placed him." 
 That's modern Christianity. You say, ** We 
 did not knock him into the ditch." We 
 shall never know what you have done or left 
 undone, until the question with us every 
 morning is, not how to do the gainful thing, 
 but how to do the just thing during the day, 
 nor until we are at least so far on the way 
 to being Christians, as to acknowledge that 
 maxim of the poor half-way Mahometan, 
 " One hour in the execution of justice is 
 worth seventy years of prayer." 
 
 —The Crown of Wii,d Owves. 
 
 October 21. 
 A BOOK is essentially not a talked thing 
 but a written thing; and written, not with 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 185 
 
 the view of mere communication, but of 
 permanence. 
 
 — Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 October 22. 
 
 Now it is only by labor that thought 
 can be made healthy, and only by thought 
 that labor can be made happy, and the two 
 cannot be separated with impunity. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 October 23. 
 
 It never seems to occur to the parents 
 that there may be an education which in it- 
 self is advancement in Life ; that any other 
 than that may perhaps be advancement in 
 Death; and that this essential education 
 might be more easily got, or given, than 
 they fancy, if they set about it in the right 
 way, while it is for no price and by no favor 
 to be got, if they set about it in the wrong. 
 — Sesame and I^iwes. 
 
i86 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 October 24. 
 
 Reason can but determine what is true. 
 
 It is the God-given passion of humanity 
 
 which alone can recognize what God has 
 
 made good. 
 
 —-Sesame and Lilies. 
 
 October 25. 
 
 Of all inorganic substances, acting in 
 their own proper nature, and without assist- 
 ance or combination, water is the most 
 wonderful. If we think of it as the source 
 of all the changefulness and beauty which 
 we have seen in clouds, then as the instru- 
 ment by which the earth we have contem- 
 plated was modeled into symmetry, and its 
 crags chiseled into grace ; then, as, in the 
 form of snow, it robes the mountains it has 
 made, with that transcendent light which 
 we could not have conceived if we had not 
 seen ; then as it exists in the form of the 
 torrent — in the iris which spans it, in the 
 morning mist which rises from it, in the 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 187 
 
 deep crystalline pools which mirror its 
 hanging shore, in the broad lake and glanc- 
 ing river; finally, in that which is to all 
 human minds the best emblem of unwearied, 
 unconquerable power, the wild, various, 
 fantastic, tameless unity of the sea ; what 
 shall we compare to this mighty, this uni- 
 versal element, for glory and for beauty ? or 
 how shall we follow its eternal changefulness 
 of feeling? It is like trying to paint a soul. 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 October 26. 
 Let man stand in due relation to other 
 creatures, and to inanimate things — know 
 them all and love them, as made for him, 
 and he for them — and he becomes himself 
 the greatest and holiest of them. But let 
 him cast off this relation, despise and forget 
 the less creation around him, and instead of 
 being the light of the world, he is as a sun in 
 space — a fiery ball, spotted with storm. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
1 88 RUSKIN- YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 October 27. 
 Make it the first morning business of 
 your life to understand some part of the 
 Bible clearly, and make it your daily business 
 to obey it in all that you do understand. 
 
 October 28. 
 
 This is the thing which I know — and 
 
 which, if you labor faithfully, you shall know 
 
 also — that in Reverence is the chief joy and 
 
 power of life ; — Reverence for what is pure 
 
 and bright in your own youth ; for what is 
 
 true and tried in the age of others ; for all 
 
 that is gracious among the living, great 
 
 among the dead — and marvelous in the 
 
 powers that cannot die. 
 
 —Lectures on Art. 
 
 October 29. 
 The healthy sense of progress, which is 
 necessary to the strength and happiness of 
 men, does not consist in the anxiety of a 
 struggle to attain higher place or rank, but 
 in gradually perfecting the manner, and ac- 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 189 
 
 complishing the ends, of the life which we 
 
 have chosen, or which circumstances have 
 
 determined for us. 
 
 —Time and Tide. 
 
 October 30. 
 
 All professions should be liberal, and 
 
 there should be less pride felt in peculiarity 
 
 of employment, and more in excellence of 
 
 achievement. 
 
 —The Stones oe Venice. 
 
 October 31. 
 Peace, Justice, and the Word of God 
 must be given to the people, not sold. And 
 these can only be given by a Hierarchy and 
 Royalty, beginning at the throne of God 
 and descending, by sacred stair, let down 
 from heaven, to bless and keep all the holy 
 creatures of God, man and beast, and to 
 condemn and destroy the unholy. And in 
 this Hierarchy and Royalty all the servants 
 of God have part, being made priests and 
 kings to Him, that they may feed His peo- 
 
190 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 pie with food of angels and food of men ; 
 teaching the word of God with power, and 
 breaking and pouring the Sacrament of 
 Bread and Wine from house to house, in re- 
 membrance of Christ, and with gladness and 
 singleness of heart. 
 
 •— FORS Cl^AVIGERA. 
 
Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old 
 earth 
 This autumn morning ! How he sets his 
 bones 
 To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out his 
 knees and feet 
 For the ripple to run over in its mirth ; 
 Listening the while where in the heap of 
 stones 
 The white breast of the sealark twitters 
 sweet. 
 
 This is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true : 
 Such is life's trials, as old Earth smiles and 
 knows. 
 If you loved only what were worth your 
 love, 
 Love were clear gain, and wholly well for 
 
 you ; 
 
 191 
 
[92 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 Make the low nature better by your 
 throes ! 
 Give earth yourself,go up for gain above! 
 — Robert Browning. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 193 
 
 November i. 
 If ever in autumn a pensiveness falls 
 upon us as the leaves drift by in their fading, 
 may we not wisely look up in hope to their 
 mighty monuments ? Behold how fair, how- 
 far prolonged, in arch and aisle, the avenues 
 of valleys ; the fringes of the hills ! So 
 stately — so eternal ; the joy of man, the 
 comfort of all living creatures, the glory of 
 the earth — they are but the monuments of 
 those poor leaves that flit faintly past us to 
 die. Let them not pass, without our under- 
 standing their last counsel and example ; 
 that we also, careless of monument by the 
 grave, may build it in the world — monument 
 by which men may be taught to remember, 
 not where he died, but where he lived. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 November 2. 
 We all know that the nightingale sings 
 ^3 
 
194 RUSKJN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 more nobly than the lark ; but who, there- 
 fore, would wish the lark not to sing, or 
 would deny that it had a character of its 
 own, which bore a part among the melodies 
 of creation no less essential than that of the 
 
 more richly gifted bird ? 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 November 3. 
 
 The will of God respecting us is that we 
 
 shall live by each other's happiness and life, 
 
 not by each other's misery or death. A 
 
 child may have to die for its parents, but 
 
 the purpose of Heaven is that it shall rather 
 
 live for them ; that, not by its sacrifice, but 
 
 by its strength, its joy, its force of being, it 
 
 shall be to them renewal of strength, and 
 
 as the arrow in the hand of the giant. So 
 
 it is in all other right relations. Men help 
 
 each other by their joy, not by their sorrow. 
 
 They are not intended to slay themselves 
 
 for each other, but to strengthen themselves 
 
 for each other. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust, 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 '95 
 
 November 4. 
 There is only one cure for public dis- 
 tress, and that is public education, directed 
 to make men thoughtful, merciful, and just. 
 — Sesamb and I^iwes. 
 
 November 5. 
 No scene is continually and untiringly 
 loved but one rich of joyful human labor: 
 smooth in field, fair in garden, full in orchard, 
 trim, sweet, and frequent in homestead ; 
 ringing with voices of vivid existence. No 
 air is sweet that is silent, it is only sweet 
 when full of low currents of under sound — 
 triplets of birds, and murmur and chirp of 
 insects, and deep-toned words of men, and 
 wayward trebles of childhood. As the art 
 of life is learned, it will be found at last that 
 all lovely things are necessary — the wild 
 flower by the wayside, as well as the tended 
 corn ; and the wild birds and creatures of 
 the forest, as well as the tended cattle; be- 
 cause man doth not live by bread only, but 
 also by the desert manna; by every 
 
196 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 wondrous word and unknowable work of 
 God. Happy in that he knew them not, 
 nor did his fathers know ; and that round 
 about him reaches yet into the infinite, the 
 amazement of his existence. 
 
 —Unto the Last. 
 
 November 6. 
 The fool, whatever his wit, is the man 
 who doesn't know his Master — who has said 
 in his heart. There is no God, no Law. 
 
 — FORS C1.AVIGERA. 
 
 November 7. 
 God has put you in a position in which 
 you may learn to speak your own language 
 beautifully ; to be accurately acquainted 
 with the elements of other languages; to 
 behave with grace, tact, and sympathy to all 
 around you ; to know the history of your 
 country, the commands of its religion, and 
 the duties of its use. If you obey His will 
 in learning these things, you will obtain the 
 power of becoming a true " lady," and you 
 
rVskin year-book. t97 
 
 will become one, if while you learn these 
 things you set yourself, with all the strength 
 of your youth and womanhood, to serve 
 His servants, until the day come when He 
 calls you to say, " Well done, good and faith- 
 ful servant ; enter thou into the joy of thy 
 
 Lord." 
 
 —Letters to Young Giri^s. 
 
 November 8. 
 This intense apathy in all of us is the 
 first great mystery of life ; it stands in the 
 way of every perception, every virtue. 
 
 —Sesame and Liwes. 
 
 November 9. 
 I WISH to plead for your several and 
 future consideration of this one truth, that 
 the notion of Discipline and Interference 
 lies at the very root of all human progress 
 or power; that the "let alone" principle is, 
 in all things which man has to do with, the 
 principle of death; that it is ruin to him, 
 certain and total, if he lets his land alone — 
 
19^ RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 if he lets his fellow-men alone— if he lets his 
 
 own soul alone. 
 
 —A Joy Forever. 
 
 November to. 
 We have, with Christianity, recognized 
 the individual value of every soul ; and there 
 is no intelligence so feeble but that its sin- 
 gle ray may in some sort contribute to the 
 
 general light. 
 
 —The Stones oe Venice. 
 
 November ii. 
 But the woman's power is for rule, not 
 for battle ; and her intellect is not for in- 
 vention or creation, but for sweet ordering, 
 arrangement, and decision. 
 
 —Sesame and I^iues. 
 
 November 12. 
 Human work must be done honorably 
 and thoroughly, because we are now men ; 
 whether we ever expect to be angels, or ever 
 were slugs, being practically no matter. 
 
 — FORS Cl^AVIGERA. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 199 
 
 November 13. 
 Now, in order that people may be happy 
 in their work, these three things are needed : 
 They must be fit for it ; they must not do 
 too much 6f it ; and they must have a sense 
 of success in it — not a doubtful sense, such 
 as needs some testimony of other people for 
 its confirmation, but a sure sense, or, rather, 
 knowledge, that so much work has been 
 done well, and faithfully done, whatever the 
 world may say or think about it. 
 
 — Pre;-Raphaki,itism. 
 
 November 14. 
 The first condition under which educa- 
 tion can be given usefully is, that it should 
 be clearly understood to be no means of 
 getting on in the world, but a means of 
 staying pleasantly in your place. 
 
 —Tims and Tide. 
 
 November 15. 
 That the occupations or pastimes of life 
 should have no motive, is understandable ; 
 
200 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 but, that life itself should have no motive — 
 that we neither care to find out what it may 
 lead to, nor guard against its being forever 
 taken from us— here is a mystery indeed. 
 —The Mystery of Life. 
 
 November i6. 
 It is far more difficult to be simple than 
 to be complicated; far more difficult to 
 sacrifice skill and cease exertion in the 
 proper place than to expend both indis- 
 criminately. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 November 17. 
 
 We are foolish, and without excuse fool- 
 ish, in speaking of the ** superiority " of one 
 sex to the other, as if they could be com- 
 pared in similar things. Each has what the 
 other has not ; each completes the other, 
 and is completed by the other. They are 
 in nothing alike, and the happiness and per- 
 fection of both depend on each asking and 
 
KUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 20I 
 
 receiving from the other what the other 
 
 only can give. 
 
 — Sesame and Liues. 
 
 November i8. 
 
 No, my friends, believe me, it is not the 
 going without education at all that we must 
 dread. The real thing to be feared is get- 
 ting a bad one. 
 
 — FORS Cl,AVIGERA. 
 
 November 19. 
 
 Let his art-gift be never so great, and 
 cultivated to the height by the schools of a 
 great race of men, and it is still but a 
 tapestry thrown over his own being and 
 inner soul ; and the bearing of it will show, 
 infallibly, whether it hangs on a man or a 
 skeleton. If you are dim-eyed, you may 
 not see the difference in the fall of the folds 
 at first, but learn how to look, and the folds 
 themselves will become transparent, and 
 you shall see through them the death's 
 shape, or the divine one, making the tissue 
 
202 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 above it as a cloud of light, or as a winding 
 
 sheet. 
 
 — ^The Queen of the Air. 
 
 November 20. 
 I DO not want painters to tell me any 
 scientific facts about olive-trees. But it 
 had been well for them to have felt and seen 
 the olive-tree ; to have loved it for Christ's 
 sake, partly also for the helmed Wisdom's 
 sake which was to the heathen in some sort 
 as that nobler wisdom which stood at God's 
 right hand, when He founded the earth and 
 established the heavens. To have loved it 
 even to the hoary dimness of its delicate 
 foliage, subdued and faint of hue, as if the 
 ashes of the Gethsemane agony had been 
 cast upon it forever; and to have traced, 
 line for line, the gnarled writhings of its 
 intricate branches, and the pointed fretwork 
 of its light and narrow leaves, inlaid in the 
 blue field of the sky, and the small rosy- 
 white stars of its spring blossoming, and the 
 beads of sable fruit scattered by autumn 
 
kUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 203 
 
 along its topmost boughs — the right, in 
 Israel, of the stranger, the fatherless, and 
 the widow — and, more than all, the softness 
 of the mantle, silver gray, and tender like 
 the down on a bird's breast, with which, far 
 away, it veils the undulation of the moun- 
 tains ; these it had been well for them to 
 have seen and drawn, whatever they had 
 left unstudied in the gallery. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 November 21. 
 Therefore, literally it is no man's busi- 
 ness whether he has genius or not ; work 
 he must, whatever he is, but quietly and 
 steadily ; and the natural and enforced re- 
 sults of such work will be always the things 
 that God meant him to do, and will be his 
 
 best. 
 
 — Pre-Raphaei<itism. 
 
 November 22. 
 The poor we must have with us always, 
 and sorrow is inseparable from any hour of 
 
204 kUSlClN VEAR-BOOIt. 
 
 life ; but we make their poverty such as 
 shall inherit the earth, and the sorrow such 
 as shall be hallowed by the hand of the 
 Comforter, with everlasting comfort. We 
 can, if we will but shake off this lethargy 
 and dreaming that is upon us, and take the 
 pains to think and act like men, we can, I 
 say, make kingdoms to be like well-governed 
 households, in which, indeed, while no care 
 or kindness can present occasional heart- 
 burnings, nor any foresight or piety antici- 
 pate all the vicissitudes of fortune, or avert 
 every stroke of calamity, yet the unity of 
 their affection and fellowship remains un- 
 broken, and their distress is neither em- 
 bittered by division, prolonged by impru- 
 dence, nor darkened by dishonor. 
 
 —The Stones oe Venice. 
 
 November 23. 
 
 Every good book, or piece of book, is 
 
 full of admiration and awe ; it may contain 
 
 firm assertion, or stern satire, but it never 
 
 sneers coldly, nor asserts haughtily, and it 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 20$ 
 
 always leads you to reverence or love some- 
 thing with your whole heart. 
 
 November 24. 
 I THINK that every rightly constituted 
 mind ought to rejoice, not so much in know- 
 ing 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 in- 
 exhaustible — watching the cloud still march 
 before them with its summitless pillar, and 
 being sure that, to the end of time and to 
 the length of eternity, the mysteries of its 
 infinity will open still farther and farther, 
 their dimness being the sign and necessary 
 adjunct of their inexhaustibleness. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 November 25. 
 By the work of the soul, I mean the 
 
2o6 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 reader always to understand the work of the 
 
 entire immortal creature, proceeding from a 
 
 quick, perceptive, and eager heart perfected 
 
 by the intellect, and finally dealt with by 
 
 the hands, under the direct guidance of 
 
 these higher powers. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
 November 26. 
 Whatever may be the means, or what- 
 ever the more immediate end, of any kind of 
 art, all of it that is good agrees in this, that 
 it is the expression of one soul talking to 
 another, and is precious according to the 
 greatness of the soul that utters it. 
 
 — The Stones of Venice. 
 
 November 27. 
 All true Art is praise. . . . Fix then 
 in your mind as the guiding principle of 
 all right practical labor, and source of all 
 healthful life — energy — that your art is to be 
 the praise of something that you love. It 
 may be only the praise of a shell or a stone; 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 207 
 
 it may be the praise of a hero ; it may be 
 the praise of God ; your rank as a living 
 creature is determined by the height and 
 breadth of your love ; but, be you small or 
 great, what healthy art is possible to you 
 must be the expression of your true delight 
 in a real thing, better than the art." 
 
 —The Laws of Fesoi^K. 
 
 November 28. 
 
 But if we can perceive beauty in every- 
 thing of God's doing, we may argue that we 
 have reached the true perception of the 
 
 Universal Laws. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 November 29. 
 
 The greatest of all mysteries of life, and 
 the most terrible, is the corruption of even 
 the sincerest religion which is not daily 
 founded on national, effective, humble and 
 helpful action. 
 
 — 3ESAME AND IyII,lES. 
 
2o8 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 November 30. 
 As you know more and more of the cre- 
 ated world, you will find that the true will 
 of its Maker is that its creatures should be 
 happy ; that He has made everything beau- 
 tiful in its time and its place, and that it is 
 chiefly by the fault of men, when they are 
 allowed the liberty of thwarting His laws, 
 that Creation groans and travails in pain. 
 
 — ly^cTUREis ON Art. 
 
December^ 
 
 One day alone of all the month is blest, 
 The dying year's most rare and splendid 
 flower, 
 Earth's dearest prize and heaven's most 
 costly gem ; 
 For on that day from sin mankind had rest, 
 And knew again its long-lost spiritual 
 power, — 
 That day a Child was born in Beth- 
 lehem. 
 
 —John Ai^bek, in "Outi.ook." 
 
 14 »09 
 
210 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 December i. 
 
 In the range of inorganic nature, I doubt 
 if any object can be more beautiful than a 
 fresh snow-drift, seen under warm light. Its 
 curves are inconceivable perfections and 
 changefulness, its surface and transparency 
 alike exquisite, its light and shade of inex- 
 haustible variety and inimitable finish, the 
 shadows sharp, pale, and of heavenly color, 
 the reflected lights intense and multitudi- 
 nous, and mingled with the sweet occur- 
 rences of transmitted light. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 December 2. 
 
 Many joys may be given to men which 
 cannot be bought for gold, and many fideli- 
 ties found in them which cannot be rewarded 
 
 with it. 
 
 —Unto the Last. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 211 
 
 December 3. 
 For a wholesome human employment is 
 the first and best method of education, men- 
 tal as well as bodily. 
 
 — The Queen of the Air. 
 
 All enmity, jealousy, opposition and 
 secrecy are wholly, and in all circumstances, 
 destructive in their nature — not productive ; 
 and all kindness, fellowship, and communi- 
 cativeness are invariably productive in their 
 operation — not destructive. 
 
 —A Joy Forever. 
 
 December 4. 
 
 Labor considered as a discipline has 
 
 hitherto been thought of only for criminals; 
 
 but the real and noblest function of labor is 
 
 to prevent crime, and not to be reformatory, 
 
 but formatory. 
 
 —The Queen of the Air. 
 
 December 5. 
 The repose which is necessary to all 
 beauty is, repose not of inanition, nor of 
 
212 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 luxury, nor of irresolution, but the repose of 
 magnificent energy and being ; in action, the 
 calmness of trust and determination ; in rest 
 the consciousness of duty accomplished and 
 of victory won, and this repose and this 
 felicity can take place as well in the midst 
 of trial and tempest as beside the waters of 
 comfort ; they perish only when the creat- 
 ure is either unfaithful to itself, or is 
 afflicted by circumstances unnatural and 
 malignant to its being, and for the contend- 
 ing with which it was neither fitted nor or- 
 dained. Hence that rest which is indeed 
 glorious is of the chamois couched heathless 
 on his granite bed, not of the stalled ox 
 over his fodder, and that happiness which is 
 indeed beautiful is in the bearing of those 
 trial tests which are appointed for the prov- 
 ing of every creature, whether it be good, or 
 whether it be evil ; and in the fulfilment to 
 the uttermost of every command it has re- 
 ceived; and the out-carrying to the utter- 
 most of every power and gift it has gotten 
 
 from its God. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 213 
 
 December 6. 
 The temper, therefore, by which right 
 taste is formed, is, first, patient. It dwells 
 upon what is submitted to it, it does not 
 trample upon it lest it should be pearls ; even 
 though it look like husks, it is a good ground, 
 soft, penetrable, retentive ; it does not send 
 up thorns of unkind thoughts, to choke the 
 weak seed ; it is hungry and thirsty too, and 
 drinks all the dew that falls on it ; it is an 
 honest and good heart, that shows no too 
 ready springing before the sun be up, but 
 fails not afterward ; it is distrustful of itself, 
 so as to be ready to believe and to try all 
 things, and yet so trustful of itself that 
 it will neither quit what it has tried, nor 
 take anything without trying. And that 
 pleasure which it has in things that it finds 
 true and good, is so great that it cannot pos- 
 sibly be led aside by any trick of fashion, 
 nor disease of vanity ; it cannot be cramped 
 in its conditions by partialities and hypoc- 
 risies ; its vision and its delights are too 
 penetrating, too living, for any whitewashed 
 
214 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 
 
 object or shallow fountain long to endure or 
 supply. It clasps all that it loves so hard 
 that it crushes it if it be hollow. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 December 7. 
 St. George's Guild. 
 
 I TRUST in the living God, Father Almighty, 
 Maker of heaven and earth and all things 
 and creatures visible and invisible. I trust 
 in the kindness of His law and the goodness 
 of His work. I will strive to love Him and 
 keep His laws and see His work while I live. 
 I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in 
 the majesty of its faculties, the fulness of its 
 mercy, and the joy of its love. And I will 
 strive to love my neighbor as myself, and 
 even when I cannot, will act as if I did. . . I 
 will not kill or hurt any living creature need- 
 lessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but 
 will strive to serve and comfort all gentle 
 life and guard and perfect all natural beauty 
 on earth. I will strive to raise my own body 
 and soul daily into all the higher powers of 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 215 
 
 duty and happiness, not in rivalship or con- 
 tention with others but for the help, delight, 
 and honor of others and for the joy and 
 peace of my own life. 
 
 — FORS Clavigera. 
 
 December 8. 
 Man is the sun of the world ; more than 
 the real sun. The fire of his wonderful 
 heart is the only light and heat worth gauge 
 or measure. Where he is, are the tropics ; 
 where he is not, the ice-world. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 December 9. 
 So it is with external Nature ; she has a 
 body and a soul like a man ; but her soul is 
 the Deity. It is possible to represent the 
 body without the spirit ; and this shall be 
 like to those whose senses are only cogni- 
 zant of body. It is possible to represent the 
 spirit in its ordinary and inferior manifesta- 
 tions, and this shall be like to those who 
 
2i6 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 have not watched for its moments of power. 
 It is possible to represent the spirit in its 
 secret and high operations, and this shall 
 be like only to those to whose watching they 
 have been revealed. All these are truth ; 
 but according to the dignity of the truths he 
 can represent or feel is the power of the 
 painter — the justice of the judge. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
 December io. 
 
 An artist need not be a learned man, but 
 he ought, if possible, to be an educated man ; 
 . . . the mind of an educated man is greater 
 than the knowledge it possesses ; it is like 
 the vault of heaven, encompassing the earth 
 which lives and flourishes beneath it ; but 
 the mind of an educated and learned man is 
 like a caoutchouc band, with an everlasting 
 spirit of contraction in it, fastening together 
 papers which it cannot open and keeps oth- 
 ers from opening. 
 
 —The Stones of Venice. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 217 
 
 December ii. 
 When you come to a good book, you 
 must ask yourself, '* Am I inclined to work 
 as an Australian miner would? Are my 
 pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am 
 I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to 
 the elbow, and my breath good, and my tem- 
 per ? " And keeping the figure a little longer, 
 even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thor- 
 oughly useful one, the metal you are in 
 search of being the author's mind or mean- 
 ing, his words are as the rock which you 
 have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. 
 And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, 
 and learning ; your smelting furnace is your 
 own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get 
 at any good author's meaning without those 
 tools and that fire; often you will need 
 sharpest, finest chiseling and patientest fuss- 
 ing before you can gather one grain of the 
 
 metal. 
 
 —Sesame and L11.1ES. 
 
 December 12. 
 For we are not sent into this world to 
 
2i8 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 do anything into which we cannot put our 
 hearts. We have certain work to do for our 
 bread, and that is to be done strenuously ; 
 other work to do for our delight and that is 
 to be done heartily ; neither is to be done by 
 halves or shifts, but with a will, and what is 
 not worth this effort is not to be done at all. 
 —The Seven L,amps of Architecture. 
 
 December 13. 
 I KNOW not that if all things had been 
 equally beautiful we could have received the 
 idea of beauty at all, or if we had, certainly 
 it had become a matter of indifference to us, 
 and of little thought, whereas through the 
 beneficent ordaining of degrees in its mani- 
 festations, the hearts of men are stirred by 
 its occasional occurrence, in its noblest form, 
 and all their energies are awakened in the 
 pursuit of it, and endeavor to arrest or re- 
 create it for themselves. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 December 14. 
 There is dreaming enough, and earthiness 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 219 
 
 enough, and sensuality enough in human ex- 
 istence without our turning the few glowing 
 monients of it into mechanism ; and since 
 our life must at the best be but a vapor that 
 appears for a little time and then vanishes 
 away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the 
 height of heaven, not as the thick darkness 
 that broods over the blast of the furnace, 
 and the rolling of the wheel. 
 
 —The Seven Lamps oe Architecture. 
 
 December 15. 
 Make, then, your choice, boldly and con- 
 sciously, for one way or other it must be 
 made. On the dark and dangerous side are 
 set the pride which delights in self-con- 
 templation, the indolence which rests in 
 unquestioned forms, the ignorance that 
 despises what is fairest among God's creat- 
 ures, and the dulness that denies what is 
 marvelous in His workings: there is a life 
 monotony for our own souls, and of mis- 
 guiding for those of others. And on the 
 other side is open to your choice the life of 
 
220 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 the crowned spirit, moving as a light in 
 
 creation — discovering always — illuminating 
 
 always, gaining every hour in strength, yet 
 
 bound down every hour into deeper humility! 
 
 sure of being right in its aim, sure of being 
 
 irresistible in its progress ; happy in what 
 
 it has securely done — happier in what, day 
 
 by day, it may securely hope ; happiest at 
 
 the close of life, when the right hand begins 
 
 to forget its cunning, to remember that 
 
 there never was a touch of the chisel or the 
 
 pencil it wielded but has added to the 
 
 knowledge and quickened the happiness of 
 
 mankind. 
 
 —The Two Paths. 
 
 December i6. 
 I TELL you, lover of liberty, there is no 
 choice offered to you, but it is similarly be- 
 tween life and death. There is no act, nor 
 option of act, possible, but the wrong deed 
 or option has poison in it which will stay in 
 your veins thereafter forever. Never more 
 to all eternity can you be as you might have 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 221 
 
 been had you not done that — chosen that. 
 You have "formed your character," for- 
 sooth ! No ; if you have chosen ill, you 
 have de-formed it, and that forever! In 
 some choices it had been better for you that 
 a red-hot iron bar struck you aside, scarred 
 and helpless, than that you had so chosen. 
 —The Queen of the Air. 
 
 December 17. 
 Read your Carlyle, then, with all your 
 heart, and with the best brain you can, give, 
 and you will learn from him, first, the 
 eternity of good law, and the need of obe- 
 dience to it. 
 
 — FORS Cl^AVIGERA. 
 
 December 18. 
 I WOULD urge every young woman to 
 obtain as soon as she can, by the severest 
 economy, a restricted, serviceable, and 
 steadily — however slowly — increasing series 
 of books for use through life, making her 
 little library, of all the furniture in her room, 
 
222 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 the most studied and decorative piece ; every 
 volume liaving its assigned place, like a little 
 statue in its niche. 
 
 December 19. 
 
 It is just as true for us, as for the crystal, 
 
 that the nobleness of life depends on its 
 
 consistency — clearage of purpose — quiet and 
 
 ceaseless energy. All doubt, repenting, and 
 
 botching, and retouching, and wondering 
 
 what will be best to do next, are vice, as 
 
 well as misery. 
 
 —Ethics of the Dust. 
 
 December 20. 
 Love and trust are the only mother-milk 
 of any man's soul. So far as he is hated 
 and mistrusted, his powers are destroyed. 
 Do not think that with impunity you can 
 follow the eyeless fool, and shout with the 
 shouting charlatan ; and that the men you 
 thrust aside with gibe and blow are thus 
 sneered and crushed into the best service 
 they can do you. I have told you they will 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK, 523 
 
 not serve you for pay. They cannot serve 
 you for scorn. . . . No man can serve you 
 either for purse or curse; neither kind of 
 pay will answer. No pay is, indeed, receiv- 
 able by any true man ; but power is receiv- 
 able by him in the love and faith you give 
 him, 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 December 21. 
 Life without industry is guilt, and in- 
 dustry without intellect is brutality. All 
 the busy world of flying looms and whirling 
 spindles begins in the quiet thought of 
 some scholar cloistered in his closet. 
 
 December 22. 
 The secret of language is the secret of 
 sympathy, and its full charm is possible only 
 to the gentle. 
 
 —Lectures on Art. 
 
 The plea of ignorance will never take 
 away our responsibilities. 
 
 — PowTiCAi, Economy of Art. 
 
224 RUSKJN YEAR-BOOK. 
 
 December 23. 
 All the best things and treasures of this 
 world are not to be produced by each 
 generation for itself ; but we are all intended 
 not to carve our work in snow that will 
 melt, but each and all of us to be continually 
 rolling a great white gathering snowball, 
 higher and higher, larger and larger, among 
 the Alps of human power. 
 
 — PowTicAi, Economy of Art. 
 
 December 24. 
 Whether we force the man's property 
 from him by pinching his stomach, or pinch- 
 ing his fingers, makes some difference ana- 
 tomically ; morally, none whatever. 
 
 — Ths Two Paths. 
 
 December 25. 
 What is this Christmas to you ? 
 
 — FORS CivAVIGERA. 
 
 December 26. 
 There is in trees no perfect form which 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 225 
 
 can be fixed upon or reasoned out as an 
 ideal ; but that is always an ideal oak which, 
 however poverty-stricken or hunger-pinched 
 or tempest-tortured, is yet seen to have done, 
 under its appointed circumstances, all that 
 could be expected of oak. 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 December 27. 
 The spirit of the hills is action ; that of 
 the lowlands, repose ; and between these 
 there is to be found every variety of motion 
 and of rest : from the inactive plain, sleep- 
 ing like the firmament, with cities for stars, 
 to the fiery peaks, which, with heaving bos- 
 oms and exulting limbs, with the clouds 
 drifting like hair from their bright foreheads, 
 lift up their Titan hands to Heaven, saying, 
 " I live forever ! " 
 
 —Modern Painters. 
 
 December 28. 
 You can't manufacture man, any more 
 than you can manufacture gold. You can 
 IS 
 
226 RUSKIN YEAR-BOOk'. 
 
 find him, refine him ; you dig him out as he 
 lies nugget-fashion in the mountain stream ; 
 you bring him home and make him into 
 current coin or household plate, but not one 
 grain of him can you originally produce. 
 
 — PowTicAi, Economy of Art. 
 
 December 29. 
 
 The more my life disappointed me, the 
 
 more solemn and wonderful it became to 
 
 me. 
 
 —Sesame and L,ii,ies. 
 
 December 30. 
 When the time comes for us to wake out 
 of the world's sleep, why should it be other- 
 wise 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 glimmer- 
 ing square ; " and then the gray, and then the 
 rose of dawn ; and last the light, whose going 
 forth is to the ends of heaven. 
 
 — Modern Painters. 
 
RUSKIN YEAR-BOOK. 227 
 
 December 31. 
 And the perfect day shall be, when it is 
 of all men understood that the beauty of 
 Holiness must be in labor as well as in rest. 
 Nay, more, if it be in labor, in our strength, 
 rather than in our weakness ; and in the 
 choice of what we shall work for through the 
 six days, and may know to be good at their 
 evening time, than in the choice of what we 
 pay for on the seventh, of reward or repose. 
 With the multitude that keep holiday, we 
 may perhaps sometimes vainly have gone up 
 to the house of the Lord, and vainly there 
 asked for what we fancied would be mercy ; 
 but for the few who labor as their Lord 
 would have them, the mercy needs no seek- 
 ing, and their wide home no hallowing. 
 Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow 
 them all the days of their life ; and they 
 shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. 
 
 i^ECTURES ON ART. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
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