or of 'Modern Painters' has given to the world. They cover every
phase of nature, every type of art, of history, society, economics,
religion; the past and the future; all rules of human duty, whether
personal or social, domestic or national.... He spake to us of trees,
from the cedar of Lebanon unto the hyssop on the wall; he spake also of
beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes. He has put
new beauty for us into the sky and the clouds and the rainbow, into the
seas at rest or in storm, into the mountains and into the lakes, into
the flowers and the grass, into crystals and gems, into the mightiest
ruins of past ages, and into the humblest rose upon a cottage wall. He
has done for the Alps and the cathedrals of Italy and France, for Venice
and Florence, what Byron did for Greece. We look upon them all now with
new and more searching eyes. Whole schools of art, entire ages of old
workmanship, the very soul of the Middle Age, have been revealed with a
new inspiration and transfigured in a more mysterious light. Poetry,
Greek sculpture, mediaeval worship, commercial morality, the training of
the young, the nobility of industry, the purity of the home,--a thousand
things that make up the joy and soundness of human life have been
irradiated by the flashing searchlight of one ardent soul: irradiated,
let us say, as this dazzling ray shot round the horizon, glancing from
heaven to earth, and touching the gloom with fire. We need not, even
to-day, be tempted from truth, or pretend that the light is permanent or
complete. It has long ceased to flash round the welkin, and its very
scintillations have disturbed our true vision. But we remember still its
dazzling power and its revelation of things that our eyes had not seen.

"What we especially love to dwell on to-day is this: that in all this
unrivalled volume of printed thoughts, in this encyclopaedic range of
topic by this most voluminous and most versatile of modern writers [may
we not say of all English writers?] there is not one line that is base,
or coarse, or frivolous; not a sentence that was framed in envy, malice,
wantonness, or cruelty; not one piece that was written to win money, or
popularity, or promotion; not a line composed for any selfish end or in
any trivial mood. Think what we may of this enormous library of print,
we know that every word of it was put forth of set purpose without any
hidden aim, utterly without fear, and wholly without guile