he went out round Oxford and
found two villages, Upper and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a
great swamp, so that the villagers could not pass from one to the other
without many miles of a round. And when we came back in winter he asked
us to help him to make a road across this morass for these village people
to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how to lay levels and
to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank--a very difficult
thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the mist and rain and mud of
an Oxford winter, and our friends and our enemies came out and mocked us
from the bank. We did not mind it much then, and we did not mind it
afterwards at all, but worked away for two months at our road. And what
became of the road? Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly--in the
middle of the swamp. Ruskin going away to Venice, when we came back for
the next term there was no leader, and the 'diggers,' as they called us,
fell asunder. And I felt that if there was enough spirit amongst the
young men to go out to such work as road-making for the sake of a noble
ideal of life, I could from them create an artistic movement that might
change, as it has changed, the face of England. So I sought them
out--leader they would call me--but there was no leader: we were all
searchers only and we were bound to each other by noble friendship and by
noble art. There was none of us idle: poets most of us, so ambitious
were we: painters some of us, or workers in metal or modellers,
determined that we would try and create for ourselves beautiful work: for
the handicraftsman beautiful work, for those who love us poems and
pictures, for those who love us not epigrams and paradoxes and scorn.

Well, we have done something in England and we will do something more.
Now, I do not want you, believe me, to ask your brilliant young men, your
beautiful young girls, to go out and make a road on a swamp for any
village in America, but I think you might each of you have some art to
practise.

* * * * *

We must have, as Emerson said, a mechanical craft for our culture, a
basis for our higher accomplishments in the work of our hands--the
uselessness of most people's hands seems to me one of the most
unpractical things. 'No separation from labour can be without some loss
of power or truth to the seer,' says Emerson again. The heroism which
would make on us the impression of Epaminondas must be that of a domest