serve
as an illustration--far better than any imaginary career--of the very
subject which just now occupies my mind. Mr. Ruskin is not only one of
the best instances, but he is positively the very best instance except
the two Humboldts, of an intellectual career which has been greatly
aided by material prosperity, and which would not have been possible
without it. This does not in the least detract from the merit of the
author of "Modern Painters," for it needed a rare force of resolution,
or a powerful instinct of genius, to lead the life of a severe student
under every temptation to indolence. Still it is true that Mr. Ruskin's
career would have been impossible for a poor man, however gifted. A poor
man would not have had access to Mr. Ruskin's materials, and one of his
chief superiorities has always been an abundant wealth of material. And
if we go so far as to suppose that the poor man might have found other
materials perhaps equivalent to these, we know that he could not have
turned them to that noble use. The poor critic would be immediately
absorbed in the ocean of anonymous periodical literature; he could not
find time for the incubation of great works. "Modern Painters," the
result of seventeen years of study, is not simply a work of genius but
of genius seconded by wealth. Close to it on my shelves stand four
volumes which are the monument of another intellectual life devoted to
the investigation of nature. De Saussure, whom Mr. Ruskin reverences as
one of his ablest teachers, and whom all sincere students of nature
regard as a model observer, pursued for many laborious years a kind of
life which was not, and could not be, self-supporting in the pecuniary
sense. Many other patient laborers, who have not the celebrity of these,
work steadily in the same way, and are enabled to do so by the
possession of independent fortune. I know one such who gives a whole
summer to the examination of three or four acres of mountain-ground,
the tangible result being comprised in a few memoranda, which,
considered as literary material, might (in the hands of a skilled
professional writer) just possibly be worth five pounds.

Not only do narrow pecuniary means often render high intellectual
enterprises absolutely impossible, but they do what is frequently even
more trying to the health and character, they permit you to undertake
work that would be worthy of you if you might only have time and
materials for the execution of it,