gainst the clouds of twilight, ghostly on the
gray precipice, stand, myriad by myriad, the shadowy armies of the
Unterwalden pine.

"I have seen that it is possible for the stranger to pass through this
great chapel, with its font of waters, and mountain pillars, and vaults
of cloud, without being touched by one noble thought or stirred by any
sacred passion; but for those who received from its waves the baptism
of their youth, and learned beneath its rocks the fidelity of their
manhood, and watched amidst its clouds the likeness of the dream of
life, with the eyes of age,--for these I will not believe that the
mountain-shrine was built or the calm of its forest-shadows guarded by
their God in vain."

But perhaps that conclusion of Ruskin's, in the new volume, which will
most interest his earnest readers, is that the Venetian school is _the
only religious school that has ever existed_. So much has Ruskin's
development seemed to contradict itself, that one is scarcely surprised
at one conclusion being apparently opposed to the former one; but a
change so great as this, from Giotto, Perugino, and Cima, to Tintoret,
Titian, and Veronese, as the religious ideals, will, indeed, amaze all
who read it. Yet this is but the logical consequence of his progression
hitherto. If he commenced with a belief that asceticism was religion, he
would recognize Perugino and Giotto as the true religious artists; but
if, as seems to be the case, he has learned at last that religion is a
thing of daily life, mingling in all that we do, caring for body as well
as soul, sense as well as spirit, and that a complete man must be a
man who _lives_ in every sense of the word, then the Venetians, as the
painters of the truth of life in _all_ its joy and sorrow, are the true
painters, and the only ones whose art was inhabited by a religion worth
following.

It is interesting to follow what are called Ruskin's contradictions and
see how perfectly they represent the whole system of artistic truth, as
seen from the different points of a young artist's or student's growth
up to mature and ripened judgment; so that there is no stage of artistic
development which has not some form of truth particularly adapted to it,
in the "Modern Painters." If it be urged that the book should have been
written only from the point of final development, it can only be said
that no true book will ever he so written, for no man can ever be
certain of his having attained fin