ce of
brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the
mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." He formed many new compound words
after the German fashion, such as "mischief-joy"; and when he pleased,
he coined new words, like "dandiacal" and "croakery."

His frequent exclamations and inversions make his style seem choppy,
like a wave-tossed sea; but his sentences are so full of vigor that
they almost call aloud from the printed page. His style was not an
imitation of the German, but a characteristic form of expression,
natural to him and to his father.

The gift of verse was denied him, but he is one of the great prose
poets of the nineteenth century. Much of _Sartor Resartus_ is highly
poetic and parts of _The French Revolution_ resemble a dramatic poem.

JOHN RUSKlN, 1819-1900

[Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN. _From a photograph_]

Life.--The most famous disciple of Carlyle is John Ruskin, the only
child of wealthy parents, who was born in London in 1819. When he was
four years old the family moved to Herne Hill, a suburb south of
London, where his intense love of nature developed as he looked over
open fields, "animate with cow and buttercup," "over softly wreathing
distances of domestic wood," to the distant hills. His entertaining
autobiography, _Praeterita_ (1885-1889), relates how he was reared:--

"I had never heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in any
question with each other ... I had never heard a servant scolded ...
I obeyed word or lifted finger, of father or mother, simply as a
ship her helm ...nothing was ever promised me that was not given;
nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever
told me that was not true... Peace, obedience, faith; these three
for chief good; next to these, the habit of fixed attention with
both eyes and mind."

He grew up a solitary child without playmates. This solitude was
relieved when his parents took him on occasional trips through
England, Switzerland, and Italy. In _Praeterita_ he tells in an
inimitable way how the most portentious interruption to his solitude
came in 1836, when his father's Spanish partner came with his four
beautiful daughters to visit Herne Hill. These were the first girls in
his own station to whom he had spoken. "Virtually convent-bred more
closely than the maids themselves," says Ruskin, "I was thrown, bound
hand and foot, in my unaccomplished simplicity, into the fiery
furnace." In f