, _The Scrap Book_, _The Boston Transcript_ and _The New
York Tribune_.

W. P. E.

Twin Fires,
Sheffield,
Mass.

[Illustration]

_Penguin Persons_

After all, one knows so little about a man from his printed works!
They are the gleanings of his thoughts and investigations, the pick of
his mind and heart; and they are at best but an impersonal and partial
record of the writer. Even autobiography has something unsatisfactory
about it; one feels the narrator is on guard always, as it were, and,
aware of an audience cold and of strangers, keeps this back and trims
up that to make himself more what he should be (or, in some perverse
cases, what he should not be). But probably no man who is worthy of
attention sits down to write a letter to a good friend with one eye on
posterity and the public. In his intimate correspondence he is off
guard. Hence, some day, when he has died, the world comes to know him
by fleeting glimpses as he was,--which is almost as near, is it not,
as we ever get to knowing one another?--knows him under his little
private moods, in the spell of his personal joys and sorrows, sees his
flashes of unexpected humor,--even, it may be, his unexpected
pettinesses Thus dangerous and thus delightful is it to publish a
great man's letters.

Such letters were Ruskin's to Charles Eliot Norton, which Professor
Norton has given to the world. No one can fail from those letters to
get a more intimate picture of the author of _Modern Painters_ than
could ever be imagined out of that work itself, and out of the rest of
his works besides, not excepting the wonderful _Fors Clavigera_; and
not only a more intimate, but a different picture, touched with
greater whimsicality, and with infinite sadness, too. Not his
hard-wrung thoughts and theories, but his moods of the moment--and he
was a man rich in the moods of the moment--tell most prominently here.
And with how many of these moods can the Ordinary Reader sympathize!
Again and again as the Ordinary Reader turns the pages he finds the
great man under the thralldom of the same insect cares and annoyances
which rule us all, until he realizes as perhaps never before that poet
and peasant, genius and scribe, are indeed one in a common humanity,
and sighs, with a lurking smile of satisfaction, "So nigh is grandeur
to our dust!"

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