and the imagery of the passionate mountains, as a man knows the face
of his friend; because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning
life and death, which are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from the
days of its first sea kings; and also the compassion and the joy that
are woven into the innermost fabric of every great imaginative spirit,
born now in countries that have lived by the Christian faith with any
courage or truth. And the picture contains also, for us, just this
which its maker had in him to give; and can convey it to us, just so
far as we are of the temper in which it must be received. It is
didactic if we are worthy to be taught, no otherwise. The pure heart,
it will make more pure; the thoughtful, more thoughtful. It has in it
no words for the reckless or the base.

[199] _The Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme_, a
lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, January 29, 1869.

[200] The elaborate pediment above the central porch at the west
end of Rouen Cathedral, pierced into a transparent web of tracery,
and enriched with a border of "twisted eglantine." [Ruskin.]

[201] _Jeremiah_ xxxi, 29.

TRAFFIC

"Traffic" is the second of the three lectures published May, 1866,
in the volume entitled _The Crown of Wild Olive_. All these
lectures were delivered in the years 1864 and 1865, but the one
here printed was earliest. The occasion on which Ruskin addressed
the people of Bradford is made sufficiently clear from the opening
sentences. The lecture is important as emphasizing in a popular
way some of his most characteristic economic theories.

TRAFFIC[202]

My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here among your hills
that I might talk to you about this Exchange you are going to build:
but, earnestly and seriously asking you to pardon me, I am going to do
nothing of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say very little,
about this same Exchange. I must talk of quite other things, though
not willingly;--I could not deserve your pardon, if, when you invited
me to speak on one subject, I _wilfully_ spoke on another. But I
cannot speak, to purpose, of anything about which I do not care; and
most simply and sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that I
do _not_ care about this Exchange of yours.

If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I had answered, "I
won't come, I don't care about the Exchange of Br