rite beautiful thoughts: he seeks to build up a
beautiful world.... When I see this author of 'Modern Painters' and the
'Stones of Venice,' the man who has exhausted almost all that Europe
contains of the beautiful, who has thought and spoken of almost every
phase of human life, and has entered so deeply into the highest
mysteries of the greatest poets--when I see him surrounding himself in
his old age with lads and lasses, schoolgirls and workmen, teaching them
the elements of science and art, reading to them poems and tales,
arranging for them games and holidays, ornaments and dresses, lavishing
on these young people his genius and his wealth, his fame and his
future--I confess my memory goes back instinctively to a fresco I saw in
Italy years ago--was it Luini's?--wherein the Master sat in a crowd of
children and forbade them to be removed, saying that 'of such is the
kingdom of heaven.'"

With this generous tribute to and appreciation of Ruskin, despite the
economic vagaries into which the great critic and teacher of his time
fell, we may more confidently approach the busy era of his later and
self-sacrificing labors, and with less apology take space to deal--as
compactly and intelligently as we can--with some of the more notable of
the many books and _brochures_ of the period. Difficult as would be the
task, fortunately there is little need to epitomize these works, as many
of them are better known, and perhaps more attentively read, than his
earlier, bulkier, and more ambitious writings. A few of them lie outside
the economic gospel of their apostolic author, and these we will first
and briefly deal with. A number of them are instructive and inspiring
lay sermons on the mystical union between nature and art, beauty and
utility, and their reflex in the reverential homage for the beautiful
and the worthy in the mind and character of the English-speaking race.
The whole form a great body of fine and thoughtful work, which is as
enchaining as its meaning is often profound. The best-known of these lay
sermons is: "The Queen of the Air" (1869), a splendid blending of his
fancy with the Greek nature-myths of cloud and storm, represented by
Athena, goddess of the heavens, of the earth, and of the heart. The
parable drawn is that "the air is given us for our life, the rain for
our thirst and baptism, the fire for our warmth, the sun for our light,
and the earth for our meat and rest." Related to the work is "Ethics of
the