arnestness did much, not only for the
elevation of his fellow-men, but for the development of sound artistic
taste and the enriching and spiritualizing of life by seeking to
surround it at all times with the true and the beautiful, and with the
old-time virtues of purity, manliness, and courage.

Among the "Beacon Lights" of the age there can be no question that
Ruskin is worthy of an exalted place, since few men of our modern time,
rich as it is in eminent thinkers and writers, has done more than he to
illumine the many subjects with which he has so fascinatingly
dealt,--and that not only in art and its cult of the Beautiful, but in
ethics, education, and political economy. The energies, activities, and
impulses he constantly put forth, as well as the high principles that
ever guided him in his earnest endeavor to improve the intellectual and
moral condition of his kind, mark his era as a great artistic epoch in
the onward and upward progress of the race. By stimulus, suggestion, and
inspiration he has powerfully influenced his time, though manifestly not
a little of the seed he abundantly and hopefully scattered has fallen
upon barren ground. Nevertheless, where the seed has fallen and
germinated, the yield has been large: "his spirit has passed far wider
than he ever knew or conceived; and his words, flung to the winds, have
borne fruit a hundredfold in lands that he never thought of or designed
to reach." With what pride and gratitude should not the age regard him
and his memory,--one who has quickened the sensibilities of men in
looking upon nature; opened our dull eyes to its manifold beauties; made
plain to the average intelligence what Art is and stands for; implanted
in our souls worship of the beautiful; shown working-men how to use their
tools in the highest interests of their craft, and taught maidens what
and how to read as well as how and in what spirit to sew and cook. The
world too often acknowledges its true teachers and prophets only when it
begins to build them some belated tomb. "This, at any rate," gratefully
exclaims Frederic Harrison,[1] "we will not suffer to be done to
John Ruskin."

[Footnote 1: Written by Mr. F.H. on Professor Ruskin's eightieth
birthday (February 8, 1899).]

"We may all of us recall to-day with love and gratitude the enormous
mass of stirring thoughts and melodious speech about a thousand things,
divine and human, beautiful and good, which for a whole half-century the
auth