hich flows from a life
of sacrifice. If he is austere, he is also very humane. The fountains
of pleasure that he would have us drink deeply from would leave no
bitter aftertaste. He delights in no pseudo-pleasure; faithfulness to
the highest ideal, untiring effort at complete self-mastery, a settled
determination to work for the good of all and to be ever on guard lest
by some inadvertence we injure some other living creature,--such are
some of the lessons upon which our philosopher insists as essential to
man's happiness.

"If," he urges, in writing for the young, "there is any one point
which, in six thousand years of thinking about right and wrong,
wise and good men have agreed upon, or successively by experience
discovered, it is that God dislikes idle and cruel people more
than any others; that His first order is, 'Work while you have
light;' and his second, 'Be merciful while you have mercy.' 'Work
while you have light,' especially while you have the light of
morning. There are few things more wonderful to me than that old
people never tell young ones how precious their youth is....
Remember, then, that I, at least, have warned _you_, that the
happiness of your life, and its power, and its part and rank in
earth or in heaven, depend on the way you pass your days now.
They are not to be sad days; far from that, the first duty of
young people is to be delighted and delightful; but they are to
be in the deepest sense solemn days. There is no solemnity so
deep, to a rightly thinking creature, as that of dawn.... You
must be to the best of your strength usefully employed during the
greater part of the day, so that you may be able at the end of it
to say, as proudly as any peasant, that you have not eaten the
bread of idleness. Then, secondly, I said, you are not to be
cruel. Perhaps you think there is no chance of your being so; and
indeed I hope it is not likely that you should be deliberately
unkind to any creature; but _unless you are deliberately kind to
every creature, you will often be cruel to many_."

Ruskin is often disquieting to conventionalists; he is too candid to
be popular with those who make long prayers and descant on charity
while they ignore justice. He puts questions to them which they do not
want to consider themselves, or to have others consider. By insisting
on the substitutio