The Project Gutenberg EBook of The King of the Golden River, by John Ruskin.

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Title: The King of the Golden River
A Short Fairy Tale

Author: John Ruskin.

Posting Date: July 23, 2008 [EBook #701]
Release Date: October, 1996

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The King of the Golden River

by

John Ruskin

PREFACE

"The King of the Golden River" is a delightful fairy tale told with all
Ruskin's charm of style, his appreciation of mountain scenery, and with
his usual insistence upon drawing a moral. None the less, it is quite
unlike his other writings. All his life long his pen was busy
interpreting nature and pictures and architecture, or persuading to
better views those whom he believed to be in error, or arousing, with
the white heat of a prophet's zeal, those whom he knew to be
unawakened. There is indeed a good deal of the prophet about John
Ruskin. Though essentially an interpreter with a singularly fine
appreciation of beauty, no man of the nineteenth century felt more
keenly that he had a mission, and none was more loyal to what he
believed that mission to be.

While still in college, what seemed a chance incident gave occasion and
direction to this mission. A certain English reviewer had ridiculed the
work of the artist Turner. Now Ruskin held Turner to be the greatest
landscape painter the world had seen, and he immediately wrote a
notable article in his defense. Slowly this article grew into a
pamphlet, and the pamphlet into a book, the first volume of "Modern
Painters." The young man awoke to find himself famous. In the next
few years four more volumes were added to "Modern Painters," and the
other notable series upon art, "The Stones of Venice" and "The Seven
Lamps of Architecture," were sent forth.

Then, in 1860, when Ruskin was about forty years old, there came a
great change. His heaven-born genius for making the appreciation of
beauty a common possession was deflected from its true field. He had
been asking himself what are the conditions that produce great art, and