th righteousness of will, and thence to confound outward and
visible success with vital achievement, that strength and energy are
always in his eyes, fighting or enduring against some phase of the many-
headed hydra of wrong.

Of Ruskin it seems almost superfluous to speak. They have read him to
little purpose who have not felt that all his essays and criticisms in
art, all his expositions in social and political science, are essentially
unified by one animating and pervading truth: the truth that to man's
moral relations, or, in other words, the developing and perfecting in him
of that Divine image in which he is made,--all things else, joy, beauty,
life itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are
consciously used to subserve that higher life. His ultimate standard of
value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political
relations, is referred, is--not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous,
sentimental, or aesthetic, but--the measure in which may thereby be
trained up that higher life of humanity. Art is to him God's minister,
not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in
such forms and phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth,
beauty, and purity. The Ios and Ariadnes of the debased Italian schools,
the boors of Teniers, the Madonnas of Guido, are truer to one phase of
nature than are Fra Angelico's angels, or Tintoret's Crucifixion. But
that nature is humanity as degraded by sense; and therefore the measure
of their truthfulness is for him also the measure of their debasement.

In poetry, the key-note so firmly struck by Wordsworth in his noble "Ode
to Duty" has been as firmly and more delicately caught up by other
singers; who, moreover, have seen more clearly than Wordsworth did, that
it is for faith, not for sight, that duty wears

"The Godhead's most benignant grace;"

for the path along which she leads is inevitably on earth steep, rugged,
and toilsome. Take almost any one of Tennyson's more serious poems, and
it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and
perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. "Ulysses" is no
restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security
by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to
press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear.
"The Lotos-eaters" are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth wh