"Ruskin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... especially horrid. Flinders' burst of chilled feeling may therefore be noted as a curious psychological fact.* (* The reader will perhaps find it interesting to compare this reference with a passage in Ruskin's Modern Painters Volume 3 chapter 13: "It is sufficiently notable that Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells thus delightedly on all the flat bits; and so I think invariably the inhabitants of ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... was written as a preface to a series of "Reminiscences" from the pen of the late Mr. W. H. Harrison, commenced in the University Magazine of May 1878. It was separately printed in that magazine in the preceding month, but owing to Mr. Ruskin's illness at the time, he was unable to see it through the press. A letter from Mr. Ruskin to Mr. Harrison, printed in "Arrows of the Chace," may be found of interest in connection with the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... all which, if it is true, must be more important than anything else. I have tired of art for the same reason. How can I be anything but a wretched dilettante, when I have no principles to ground my criticism on, beyond bosh about 'The Beautiful'? I did pluck up heart and read Mr. Ruskin's books greedily when they came out, because I heard he was a good Christian. But I fell upon a little tract of his, 'Notes on Sheepfolds,' and gave him up again, when I found that he had a leaning to that 'Clapham sect.' ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... sentimental world has looked with pathetic sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The name of the bridge was given by the people from that opulence of compassion which enables the Italians to pity even rascality in difficulties. [Footnote: The reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said in a few words, much better than I have said in many, the same thing of sentimental ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... thus discovers its true haven; it lays down the sword; its voice calls no longer to strife, but to peace; it now inspires and uplifts, and Greek literature ends with Socrates and Plato, Rome with Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, England with Carlyle and Ruskin, America with Emerson, and Germany with Goethe. Letters indeed go on in England, in America, and in Germany, but the cycle is completed; and higher than Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin, the soul need not seek ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... have opinions of his own. The fact of the matter is that at any time there is only a very limited number of men who think for themselves. The rest think other people's thoughts and think they are thinking and doing things. As for observation, John Ruskin once said, "Nothing is harder than to see something and tell it simply as you saw it." This is as true in science as in art, and only genius succeeds in ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... it is generally called, is a book which, for various reasons, has never received from readers of Mr. Ruskin's writings the attention it deserves. True, it has always been sought after by connoisseurs, and collectors never fail with their eleven or twelve guineas whenever a set of Artist's Proofs of the First Edition of 1856 comes into the market. ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... are many law-abiding and transparently honest persons who prefer anthologies to "works," who love to read tiny volumes prettily bound, called "Beauties of Ruskin," and who have substituted for the out-of-fashion "Daily Food" books, painted bits of cardboard with sweet sayings culled from popular idols of the day, with which they embellish the walls of their offices and bedrooms, in the hope that they may hoist themselves into a more ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... taken the trip on the Great Lakes. To me the Great Lakes will always mean Lake Superior. It is something unique in the geography of the world, and you have the consciousness of your actual height above the level of the sea as you rarely have on any elevated land that is not actually a mountain. Ruskin says that for him the flowers lose their light, the river its music, when he tries to divest any given landscape of its associations with human struggle and endeavor. Our New World scenery, of course, has little of that wonderful charm ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... in a manner not unlike that which suggests itself to the terrier at the sight of a rat. We must master the heights above, and we become slaves to the climbing impulse, itinerant purveyors of untold energy, marking the events of our lives on peaks and passes. We may merit to the full Ruskin's scathing indictment of those who look upon the Alps as soaped poles in a bear-garden which we set ourselves "to climb and slide down again with shrieks of delight," we may become top-fanatics and record-breakers, "red with ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... matter of appearance. Such "ornamentation" as there was was usually obtained by following in a mechanical way a drawing provided by an artist who often knew little of the technical processes involved in production. With the critical attention given to the crafts by Ruskin and Morris, it came to be seen that it was impossible to detach design from craft in this way, and that, in the widest sense, true design is an inseparable element of good quality, involving as it does the selection of good and suitable ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... the field of his intended researches be very limited, or the amount of time which he proposes to devote to the study very great, the result can scarcely be of a satisfactory nature. But there is another answer to Mr. Ruskin, which has more force when addressed to one so renowned as a critic and exponent of Art. The eye of Genius seizes what escapes ordinary observation. The province of Art is to reveal Nature, to elucidate her obscurities, to present her, not otherwise than as she is, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... writers may he mentioned the names of William and Mary Howitt, Isaac Taylor, Arthur Helps, and the brothers Hare, and in art-criticism the brilliant and paradoxical Ruskin (b. 1819) and the accomplished ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... is a rare one." Ruskin writes truly that, "one rarely meets even an educated person who can select a good carpet, a wall paper, and a ceiling, and have them in harmony." There is too much of a temptation to adopt beautiful ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... impressions you would care to hear either upon the Coliseum, Niagara Falls, or any other of the great works of art or of nature? On such subjects the remarks of the cleverest and stupidest are equally inadequate and the superb vocabulary of a Ruskin will probably not be more illuminating than what the school-boy writes in the Visitors' Book at Niagara, "Uncle and ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... to question the occurrence of these marvels; how do we know what takes place on the banks of the Ganges, whither we are borne on the wings of song? This, indeed, would be Heine's answer to any criticism based upon Ruskin's notion as to the "pathetic fallacy." If the setting is such as to induce in us the proper mood, we readily enter the non-rational realm, and with credulous delight contemplate wonders such as we ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... took a great hold of me on that voyage—Mazzini's Duties of Man and Cellini's Life. I suppose they are about as far apart as any two books—or men—could get. You may laugh at the notion, but I found myself in sympathy with both! Mazzini appealed to my mind, Cellini to my imagination. If Ruskin had stuck to his last as Mazzini did, he might have made a revolution in England. I'm not a Socialist, never was, any more than Mazzini, and there was something fine to me about the way he told these boiling, ignorant, weak-minded mobs of Italian workmen that they had duties ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... commonplace has enfolded the once bright town below; and this Orthez is to-day at best but a lounging-place for the pessimist. We shall love better Pau, its rival and successor, still buoyant and prospering, rising not falling. "Good men study and wise men describe," avers Ruskin, in a more than half-truth, "only the growth and standing of things,—not their decay. Dissolution and putrescence are alike common and unclean ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... degraded spirit to matter, traced a soul in nature, and was in danger of elevating matter to spirit. Other branches of art besides poetry exhibit a similar change of tone. This is remarkably manifest in the modern landscape art of England, and is developed incidentally in Mr. Ruskin's work, The Modern Painters. We have already had occasion, in Lecture VI, to advert to the similarity in result of the Lake school of English poetry to the Romantic school of Germany. Both were spiritual ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Ruskin says, "Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, religion, ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... days later I went through another factory, and I came out weary and spent at night, feeling as unreasonable and almost as hateful about machines, and as discouraged about the people who had to work with them as John Ruskin did in those first early days when the Factory Chimney first lifted its long black flag upon our earth, and bullied great cities into cowards and slaves, and all the great, quiet-hearted nations, and began making for us—all around us, before ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Ruskin so belaboured the poor ancients about their landscapes that when I was a youth he had taught me to believe that Claude and Ruisdael were mere duffers. So when he speaks of Whistler, as we shall presently see, his blame is so exaggerated that it ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... old-fashioned.) Mrs. and Miss Archer were both great lovers of scenery. It was what they principally sought and admired on their occasional travels abroad; considering architecture and painting as subjects for men, and chiefly for learned persons who read Ruskin. Mrs. Archer had been born a Newland, and mother and daughter, who were as like as sisters, were both, as people said, "true Newlands"; tall, pale, and slightly round-shouldered, with long noses, sweet smiles and a kind of drooping distinction like that in certain ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... a single flow, are the recumbent figures of two bishops at Amiens; they are of the thirteenth century. Ruskin says: "They are the only two bronze tombs of her men of the great ages left in France." An old document speaks of the "moulds and imagines" which were in use for ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... afternoon tea, Miss Rylance doing her best to improve the occasion with Peter, who was not educated up to the standard of metropolitan or South Kensingtonian young ladyhood, and who came out very badly under the process of development; for when talked to about Ruskin he was at first altogether vacuoous, but, on being pushed har believed there was a biggish swell of some such name among the Oxford dons, about whom he could not fairly be expected to know anything, as he and his brother were Cantabs: while on being languidly asked his ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... M. TURNER, the greatest of English artists, and the hero of Mr. Ruskin's brilliant book entitled The Modern Painters, died in London on the 20th of December, at the age of 77. He had always a reluctance to have his portrait taken, but the engraving accompanying this article—from a sketch made without his knowledge—is ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... last generation, to Carlyle and Ruskin, and in a certain degree to Matthew Arnold. Each had his group of enthusiastic disciples who responded eagerly to their master's call. They renounced shams or machine-made articles or middle-class Philistinism as the case might be. They went ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... winter of 1862 was spent somewhat listlessly, partly in Germany and partly at the Hotel des Bergues, Geneva, where his old acquaintance Colonel Tronchin was hospitably ready to open all doors. The picturesque figure of John Ruskin also flits across the scene at this time. But Yule was unoccupied and restless, and could neither enjoy Mr. Ruskin's criticism of his sketches nor the kindly hospitality of his Genevan hosts. Early in 1863 he made another ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... moment confused. He was thinking of such books as Carlyle's "Past and Present"—Emerson's "Essays" and the works of Ruskin. But he remembered in good time that for an old "basket-maker" to be familiar with such literary masterpieces might seem strange to a wide-awake "journalist," therefore he ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... without question. There is much to condemn in the rise of the economic over the imaginative spirit, much for which the energetic Philistine can never atone. Perhaps the deepest pathos of all may be found in the spectacle of John Ruskin weeping at the profanation of the world by the vandalism of the age. Steam launches violate the sanctity of the Venetian canals; where Xerxes bridged the Hellespont ply the filthy funnels of our modern shipping; electric ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Ruskin notices how repeatedly Turner,—the most imaginative of landscape painters,—introduced into his pictures, after a lapse of many years, memories of something which, however small and unimportant, had struck him in his earlier ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Christina, possessed the most purely poetical nature in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as possible—as puppies and tomtits do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing incomprehensible ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... frescoes of the 'Assumption of the Virgin,' in which legs and arms in wild play are chiefly conspicuous from below, that Correggio had prepared for the Parmese 'a fricassee of frogs.' In addition, the great modern critic, Mr Ruskin, has boldly accused Correggio 'both of weakness and meretriciousness,' and there is this to be said of a nature so highly strung as Correggio's was strung, that it was not a healthily ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... the bushes; its deep cut leaves, its countless tendrils, its flowers, and presently the berries, giving pleasure every time one passed it. Indeed, you could not pass without stopping to look at it, and wondering if any one ever so skilful, even those sure-handed Florentines Mr. Ruskin thinks so much of, could ever draw that intertangled mass of lines. Nor could you easily draw the leaves and head of the great parsley—commonest of hedge-plants—the deep indented leaves, and the shadow by which to express them. There was work enough in that short piece of hedge ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... interpretation of the comedie humaine; Emerson, who, oblivious of all the glories of art or the joys of nature, absorbed himself in writing transcendental letters to his eccentric, but high-souled aunt, Mary Moody Emerson; Ruskin, translating Italian art to Italy herself; Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and his poet wife, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, in the first flush of their bridal happiness, when Mrs. Howe's impassioned love for the Seven-hilled City inspired ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... reading Mr. Ruskin's book, Claude, to be able to give birth to such a piece of complex magniloquence as that ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... we were at perfect liberty to imagine we were eating. I am sorry you were not there. The hors d'oeuvres! Holder describes hors d'oeuvres better than any man I know. Oh, masterly, the colour ... RUSKIN, perhaps. Anyhow, he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... bit' and so to find happiness in their daily work, or if you prefer more distinctively religious language, the degree to which it enables men to develop the God that is in them. Let us have the courage to say that in the great battle which Ruskin and William Morris fought almost single-handed against all the Philistines of the nineteenth century, Ruskin and Morris, however wrong they may have been on points of practical detail, were right in principle. Let us make up ...
— Progress and History • Various
... was to represent with sincerity what they saw, and the simple sincerity of painters who preceded Raphael led them to choose a name which Ruskin called unfortunate, "because the principles on which its members are working are neither pre- nor post-Raphaelite, but everlasting. They are endeavoring to paint with the highest possible degree of completion what they see in nature, without reference to conventional established rules; but by no ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... languishing under Dean Gaisford's mismanagement. Here for three years he enjoyed himself thoroughly. He rode with the drag, was President of the Archery Club, played whist, gave and received a great deal of hospitality, and made some lifelong friendships. Among his contemporaries was Ruskin, of whom his recollection was certainly depressing. "He seemed to keep himself aloof from everybody, to seek no friends, and to have none. I never met him in anyone else's rooms, or at any social gathering. I see him now, looking rather crazy, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Such letters were Ruskin's to Charles Eliot Norton, which Professor Norton has given to the world. No one can fail from those letters to get a more intimate picture of the author of Modern Painters than could ever be imagined out of that work itself, and out of the rest of his ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... extravagant manner of dress and his methods of courting publicity. The great men of the previous generation, Wilde's intellectual peers, with whom he was in artistic sympathy, looked on him askance. Ruskin was disappointed with his former pupil, and Pater did not hesitate to express disapprobation to private friends; while he accepted incense from a disciple, he distrusted ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... retentive memory and splendid imagination, and there are few writers to-day with so large an audience assured in advance. The subjects include: Dante; Savonarola; William the Silent; Oliver Cromwell; John Wesley; John Milton; Garibaldi; John Ruskin, etc. ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... sell his pictures, and Constable, who couldn't, between them filled up the measure of English art without any other aid than that of the materials with which they recorded their gorgeous communion with nature. When Ruskin stepped in with the "Modern Painters," originally designed as a vindication of Turner against certain later-day critics, Turner's comment was, "He knows a great deal more about my pictures than I ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... of the reasoned thoroughness in workmanship, which is the first article in the creed of those who ... are attempting to carry into practice the industrial teaching of Ruskin and William Morris." ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... followed the trade in London with some success, but this artist was a wan, meagre-looking child. It was Jan. He drew with extraordinary rapidity; not with the rapidity of slovenliness, but with the rapidity of a genius in the choice of what Ruskin calls "fateful lines." At his back stood the hunchback, who "pattered" in description of the drawings as glibly as he used to "puff" his own wares as a ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... mantle as she finally departed; and we still have the Della Cruscan essence, if not in the precise form of earlier times. We still have ethereal beings who, as the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and poetry, and Halle and Ruskin, and horribly neglect their babies and ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... generally supposed, in the course of his development, and, though never thought of as a thing apart from what it expresses, was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers, he said, 'make time to write English more as a learned language.' It has been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and Flaubert were among the chief 'origins' of Pater's style; it is curiously significant that matter, in Pater, was developed before style, and that in the bare and angular outlines of the earliest fragment, Diaphaneite, there is already the substance which is to be clothed ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Poetry, p. 34.] that "the central processes or kinds of activity involved in the making of poetry are three: personalizing, combining and versifying," it is obvious that we have been dealing with the first two. If we prefer to use the famous terms employed by Ruskin in Modern Painters, we have been considering the penetrative, associative and contemplative types of imagination. But these Ruskinian names, however brilliantly and suggestively employed by the master, are dangerous tools for the beginner ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... The few alterations are usually additions. For example, a fresh pedantry of the Baron of Bradwardine's is occasionally set down on the opposite page. Nothing can be less like the method of Flaubert or the method of Mr. Ruskin, who tells us that "a sentence of 'Modern Painters' was often written four or five tunes over in my own hand, and tried in every word for perhaps an hour,—perhaps a forenoon,—before it was passed for the printer." Each writer has his method; Scott was no stipples or ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Ruskin's Miscellanies, he discovered that it had been employed to support the dismantled leg of a dressing bureau. On another occasion, a volume of Schopenhauer, which he had been at much difficulty and expense to procure, Emerson's Essays, ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... divines. Here the lack of all possible moral sympathy would prove that his interest was purely verbal or pictorial, as it is; in all the books he reads and writes he clings to the skirts of his own morality and his own immorality. The champion of l'art pour l'art is always denouncing Ruskin for his moralizing. If he were really a champion of l'art pour l'art, he would be always insisting on Ruskin ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... interpretation of nature at all, but an interpretation of the writer or the poet himself. The poet or the essayist tells what the bird, or the tree, or the cloud means to him. It is himself, therefore, that is being interpreted. What do Ruskin's writings upon nature interpret? They interpret Ruskin—his wealth of moral and ethical ideas, and his wonderful imagination. Richard Jefferies tells us how the flower, or the bird, or the cloud is related to his subjective life and experience. It means this or that to him; ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books. It has always seemed to me that "Sesame and Lilies" would not have been conceived by Ruskin if he had not heard well an echo of "The Following of Christ." There was a time when the lovers of Ruskin who wanted to read "The Stones of Venice" and the rest at leisure, felt themselves obliged to form clubs, and to divide the expense, if they were of moderate means, in order to get what ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... makers." It is a source of regret that even a shadow of reproach should be cast upon distinguished men, particularly when the question of blame is debatable, as when, for instance, a picture portraying the love affair between Sir John Millais, the artist, and Ruskin's wife, was actually ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... found himself completely at sea. American newspapers, it appeared to him, were written in two languages. One was the English language as he had studied it in the writings of Oliver Goldsmith, John Ruskin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In America it seemed to be used chiefly by auctioneers, art critics, and immigrants. The other was a dialect, evidently English in origin, but sufficiently removed from the parent stock to be quite unintelligible. The professor spent many painful hours over such sentences ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... mine. All I can do is to state them in the way in which they present themselves to my own mind. I shall be genuine, if not original, although indeed I might here shelter myself under a dictum—profoundly true it is—of Mr. Ruskin: "That virtue of originality that men so strive after is not newness, as they vainly think (there is nothing new) it is ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... is an anachronism. The Bridge of Sighs was built by Antonio da Ponte, in 1597, more than a century after the death of Francesco Foscari. "It is," says Mr. Ruskin, "a work of no merit and of a late period, owing the interest it possesses chiefly to its pretty name, and to the ignorant sentimentalism of Byron" (Stones of Venice, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... a partial, at times a total, eclipse. Childe Harold sees himself in all that he sees, projects himself into Belgium, Athens and Rome, and colours the bluest skies with the jaundiced hues of his temperament. This is almost equally true of Carlyle's pupils, Ruskin and Froude, and, among the moderns, of a swarm of minor poets and novelists, who display before the public the pageant of their indignant or bleeding hearts. Egotism is a fault of manners as much as of morals, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... exterminated by arsenic, like rat; whether in general we are getting on, and if so where we are going to; whether it's worth while to ascertain any of these things; whether one's tongue was ever made to talk with or only to taste with.-JOHN RUSKIN. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... magnificent city I ever saw, and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it. Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her ancient rival impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little grotesque Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces are, as usual, loaded with ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... and ten is usually ill-timed for a proper perspective of his work. A generation has elapsed since his death. Fashions have changed; writers, like bits of old furniture, have had time to "go out" and not time enough to come in again. George Eliot and Ruskin, for instance, whose centenaries fall in this year, suffer the dark reproach of having been "Victorians." The centenaries of Hawthorne and Longfellow and Whittier were celebrated at a period of comparative ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... and they are very lamentable. But always, too, among those old populations, there was one saving element; the now want of which, especially the unlamented want, transcends all lamentation. Here is one of those strange, piercing, winged-words of Ruskin, which has in it a terrible truth for us ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... the equivalent of the Byronic club foot, because they took away his citizenship in Boyville, and drove him in upon himself, and, at first, upon his school books which he mastered so easily and quickly as to become the star pupil of the Woodruff District school, and later upon Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin and the poets, and the agricultural ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... one finds in the angry and resentful reception of the Pre-Raphaelites another instance of the absolutely indefensible nature of many of the most beautiful propositions. And as a still more striking and remarkable case, take the onslaught made by Ruskin upon the works of Whistler. You will remember that a libel action ensued and that these pictures were gravely reasoned about by barristers and surveyed by ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... ultimately a religious root; that is why men find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice. Ruskin rebuked Coleridge for praising freedom, and said that no man would wish the sun to be free. It seems enough to answer that no man would wish to be the sun. Speaking as a Liberal, I have much more sympathy with the idea of ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... man, a young author of twenty-four years, just one year out of college, came forth with his pen, and wrote the ablest and most famous essays on art that the world ever saw, or ever will see—John Ruskin's "Modern Painters." For seventeen years this author fought the battles of the maltreated artist, and after, in poverty and broken-heartedness, the painter had died, and the public tried to undo their cruelties toward him by ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... stripped of their buds and leaves, and soon wither and fall off. These effects are observable at a great distance, and a wood-pasture is recognized, almost as far as it can be seen, by the regularity with which its lower foliage terminates at what Ruskin somewhere calls the "cattle-line." This always runs parallel to the surface of the ground, and is determined by the height to which domestic quadrupeds can reach to feed upon the leaves. In describing a visit to the grand-ducal farm of ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... illustrated by Dr. Holmes, emancipating us from foreign fine-writing, leaves us free to welcome the true manhood and mature wisdom of Europe. In the time of our old prosperity, amusing a leisure evening over Kingsley or Ruskin, we were tempted to exclaim, with Sir Peter Teazle, "There's nothing half so noble as a man of sentiment!" But in these latter days we have seen "Mr. Gradgrind" step from Dickens's wretched caricature to bring his "facts" to the great cause of humanity, while "Joseph ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... view, and made his way into the intellectual kingdoms of the modern world that lay beyond. The Weltgeist had appealed to him with its irresistible behest, just as it appealed at about the same time to Ibsen and Tolstoy and Ruskin, and had made him a man of ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... attitude is always that of seeking for truth, and men who on the contrary always believe that they have the root of it already in them. Davidson was of the latter class. Like his countrymen, Carlyle and Ruskin, he felt himself to be in the possession of something, whether articulate or as yet articulated by himself, that authorized him (and authorized him with uncommon openness and frequency) to condemn the errors of others. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... from the stable with a great parcel of books, done up in green cloth, which he laid before the Colonel. Opened, the parcel proved to contain not books only, but forbidden books—books by Herbert Spencer, by Mr. Ruskin, by Monsieur Renan! I was astonished at seeing them, and my first thought was that they belonged to my brother, who might have forgotten them there in the stable, or to my cousins, who, without being revolutionists, were interested in forbidden literature just because it was ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a shallower or more short-sighted criticism than that which has held that science is the enemy of romance. Ruskin, with all the April showers of his rhetoric, discredited himself as an authoritative thinker when he screamed his old-maidish diatribes against that pioneer of modern romantic communication, the railroad. Just as surely his idol Turner proved himself a romantic painter, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... hundreds of books are launched every day from the press, do not be ashamed to confess ignorance of the majority of the volumes printed. If you have no artistic appreciation, spend neither your dollars nor your time on John Ruskin. Do not say that you are fond of Shakespeare if you are not interested in him, and after a year's study would not know Romeo from John Falstaff. There is an amazing amount ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... persistence of the mental attitude in the modern child, Ruskin gives a charming example, in his "Ethics of the Dust." "One morning after Alice had gone, Dotty was very sad and restless when she got up; and went about, looking into all the corners, as if she would ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... industrial product. That would imply that industry must be seized upon and conquered by those educators, who now either avoid it altogether by taking refuge in the caves of classic learning or beg the question by teaching the tool industry advocated by Ruskin and Morris in their first reaction against the present industrial system. It would mean that educators must bring industry into "the kingdom of the mind"; and pervade it ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... the plays of the third period as evidence of Shakspere's final thought, it will be well to pause and re-read with attention a summing-up of Shakspere's teaching as it has been presented to us by one of the greatest and most earnest teachers of morality of the present day. Every word that Mr. Ruskin writes is so evidently from the depth of his own good heart, and every doctrine that he enunciates so pure in theory and so true in practice, that a difference with him upon the final teaching of Shakspere's ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... inspiring their brethren with His faith and purpose, are conscious that through them the Spirit of God is entering more and more into His world, revealing the Father in the new community of love, which is being born. Sir Edward Burne-Jones once wrote: "That was an awful word of Ruskin's, that artists paint God for the world. There's a lump of greasy pigment at the end of Michael Angelo's hog-bristle brush, and by the time it has been laid on the stucco, there is something there, that all men with eyes recognize as Divine. ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... interest which they found they had in common: church music, and the difficulty they had in getting people to sing in parts; Salisbury Cathedral, which they had both seen; styles of church architecture, Ruskin's works, and parish schools, in which Mr. Livingstone was somewhat shocked to find that Ellinor took no great interest. When the gentleman came in from the dining-room, it struck Ellinor, for the first time in her life, that her father had taken more wine than was good for him. Indeed, ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... was more than the policy of the Paper in this. Du Maurier was an optimist. An optimist is a man who thinks that everything is going right when it is going wrong. It requires an effort of the imagination to recall and picture the fact that in the first hour of Du Maurier's mere amusement Ruskin was adding his lachrymation to Carlyle's over a society going swiftly to Gehenna. It is the entire absence of despair, bitterness, or cynicism in his work that gives it its altogether unique place in the history ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... for you to sneer, and talk about art. But there are already in this world a deal more Standard Works than any man can hope to digest in the average lifetime. I don't quarrel with them, for, personally, I find even Ruskin, like the python in the circus, entirely endurable so long as there is a pane of glass between us. But why, in heaven's name, should you endeavour to harass humanity with one more battalion of morocco-bound reproaches for sins of omission, whenever ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... alluded. It is a trite remark, that even devout men of the present generation prefer temples not made with hands to churches, and worship God in the fields more contentedly than in their pews. What Mr. Ruskin calls 'the instinctive sense of the divine presence not formed into distinct belief' lies at the root of our profound veneration for the nobler aspects of mountain scenery. This instinctive sense has been very variously expressed by Goethe in Faust's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... realize, if we want it enough to work for it steadily day by day. Nothing will increase our realization of the need more than a little daily thought of the quiet in the workings of Nature and the consequent appreciation of our own lack. Ruskin tells the story with his own expressive power when he says, "Are not the elements of ease on the face of all the greatest works of creation? Do they not say, not there has been a great effort here, but there has ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... with a phenomenal existence, with appearances, with effects; and our knowledge of these is entirely mental. We see all things as thought. These thoughts, such as feeling, seeing, hearing, and so on, we ignorantly attribute to the five physical senses. This is what Ruskin calls the 'pathetic fallacy.' And because we do so, we find ourselves absolutely dependent upon these senses—in belief. Moreover, quoting Spencer again, only the absolutely real is the absolutely persistent, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... infant, strangling the serpents, or Mercury running off with the oxen of Admetus, or bacchic Dionysus. In Egypt, in the eleventh, or twelfth dynasty, we do find a family of gods, the triad, father (Amun), mother (Maut), child (Khuns). Mr. Scott follows Ruskin in declaring that classic Greek art gives no real child-concept; nor does Gothic art up to the thirteenth century, when the influence of Christianity made itself felt, that influence which made art lavish its genius upon ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... somewhere that the lineal descendants of the man who carted off the body of William Rufus, with Walter Tyrrel's arrow sticking in it, have driven a cart (not absolutely the same one, I suppose) in the New Forest, from that day to this. I don't quite understand Mr. Ruskin's saying (if he said it) that he couldn't get along in a country where there were no castles, but I do think we lose a great deal in living where there are so few permanent homes. You will see how much I parted ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the literary haunts of the great masters, I made the acquaintance of the leaders of the Socialist movement. I went to St. Albans to attend the first convention of the Ruskin societies. The convention was composed of men who in literature and life were translating into terms of life and labour ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... the spiritistic representatives as soon as they learned that strictly scientific methods of inquiry were to prevail; or by the accession, as honorary members, of national figures like W. E. Gladstone, John Ruskin, Lord Tennyson, A. R. Wallace, Sir William ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... of Mr. Willett to go with us to visit Mr. Ruskin, with whom he is in the most friendly relations. But a letter from Mr. Ruskin's sister spoke of his illness as being too serious for him to see company, and we reluctantly gave up ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... to see his friend. When Holmes arrived in England, Lord Houghton was in his grave, and so was Dean Stanley, whose sweetness of disposition had so charmed the autocrat, when the two men had met in Boston a few years before. Ruskin he failed to meet also, for the distinguished word-painter was ill. At a dinner, however, at Arch-Deacon Farrar's, he spent some time with Sir John Millais and Prof. John Tyndall. Of course, he saw Gladstone, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Chief Justice Coleridge, Du ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... author, as mentor, leads an imaginary disciple up and down the land, pointing out to him the "bold, upholsterrific blunders" to be found in the architecture of the day, and commenting on them in a caustic, colloquial style—large, loose, discursive—a blend of Ruskin, Carlyle and Whitman, yet all Mr. Sullivan's own. He descends, at times, almost to ribaldry, at others he rises to poetic and prophetic heights. This is all a part of his method alternately to shame and inspire his pupil to some sort of creative ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Removal to Yale. New energy in study and reading. Influence of Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin. Yale in 1850. My disappointment at the instruction; character of president and professors; perfunctory methods in lower-class rooms; "gerund-grinding'' vs. literature; James Hadley—his abilities and influence, other professors; influence of President Woolsey, Professors ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... here! And if I may put it modestly, for my share in it, I think we two young Americans looking on at this supreme excess of the rococo, are the very essence of the sentiment of the scene; but what would the honored connoisseurs—the good folks who get themselves up on Ruskin and try so honestly hard to have some little ideas about art—make of us? To be sure they might justifiably praise the grace of your pose, if I were so lucky as to catch it, and your way of putting ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... 'What does cookery mean?' Mr. Ruskin says: 'It means the knowledge of Circe and Medea, and of Calypso and of Helen, and of Rebekah and of all the Queens of Sheba. It means knowledge of all fruits and balms and spices, and of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savory to meals; it means carefulness ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln
... desire to look well which makes many a plain face comely, as well as many a pretty one ugly for want of skill and knowledge of the fitness of things. She also took her turn to provide books for the readings, and as art was her forte she gave them selections from Ruskin, Hamerton, and Mrs Jameson, who is never old. Bess read these aloud as her contribution, and Josie took her turn at the romances, poetry, and plays her uncles recommended. Mrs Jo gave little lectures on health, religion, politics, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Hirst, therefore, I award this prize, feeling sure that I do so at the wish of the whole school. Come here, my dear," she continued, as the surprised and blushing Patty was led to the platform by Miss Rowe. "You must accept this copy of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies; it is a book that I think you will like some day, when you are older, even if you cannot quite understand it now. Those who go through life with a pleasant smile and a kind word make ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... wooded, especially in the neighbourhood of Clare House Park, the Spanish or edible chestnut, with its handsome dark green lanceolate serrate leaves, and clumps of Scotch firs, with their light red trunks and large cones, the result of healthy growth, which would have delighted the heart of Mr. Ruskin, being conspicuous. On the road we pass a field sown with maize, a novelty to one accustomed to the Midlands. The farmer to whom it belongs says that it is a poor crop this year, owing to the excess of ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... would have been more suitable. A very considerable proportion of the museum's space is devoted to the collection of pictures—some of them copies—which the University has gathered. The interesting Turner water-colours presented by John Ruskin are here, with a Murillo, reputed to be his earliest known work, and a good many other examples of the work of famous men of the Italian ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... two or three teachers, Frank," he replied, "greater than Mahaffy; teachers of the world as well as of Oxford. There was Ruskin for instance, who appealed to me intensely—a wonderful man and a most wonderful writer. A sort of exquisite romantic flower; like a violet filling the whole air with the ineffable perfume of belief. Ruskin has always seemed to me the Plato of England—a Prophet of the Good and True and Beautiful, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... of life,—Saint Beauve, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Scherer, Amiel, Tolstoi, and Ruskin—have felt, or at least recognized, the powerful fascination of the new evangel ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... who, in the reign of the respectable Louis-Philippe, discovered that "Nicolas Poussin etait doue d'une foi profonde: la piete fut son seul refuge," is in the same boat. And for companion they have Mr. Ruskin, who, being, like them, incapable of a genuine aesthetic emotion, is likewise incapable of infecting a truly sensitive reader. So far as I remember, Ruskin's quarrel with Poussin is that to his picture of the Flood he has given a prevailing air of sobriety and gloom, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... linguistic usage is, we chose fifty authors, now alive or living till recently, and have carefully read three hundred pages of each. We have minutely noted and recorded what these men by habitual use declare to be good English. Among the fifty are such men as Ruskin, Froude, Hamerton, Matthew Arnold, Macaulay, De Quincey, Thackeray, Bagehot, John Morley, James Martineau, Cardinal Newman, J. R. Green, and Lecky in England; and Hawthorne, Curtis, Prof. W. D. Whitney, George P. Marsh, Prescott, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... the purposes of the laboratory, then approaching completion. This proposal was fought with the utmost bitterness by Sanderson's opponents, the anti-vivisectionists including E.A. Freeman, John Ruskin and Bishop Mackarness of Oxford. Ultimately the money was granted by 412 to 244 votes. In 1895 Sanderson was appointed regius professor of medicine at Oxford, resigning the post in 1904; in 1899 he was created a baronet. His attainments, both in biology ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... our office and bit our thumbs all day; the thousands stopped at home. We had ample opportunities for making studies of the decorative detail on the Campanile, till we knew every square inch of it better than Mr. Ruskin. Elsie's notebook contains, I believe, eleven hundred separate sketches of the Campanile, from the right end, the left end, and the middle of our window, with eight hundred and five distinct distortions ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... reciprocated Hill's ill-veiled rivalry, became a tribute to her indefinable charm; she was the Queen of Beauty in a tournament of scalpels and stumpy pencils. To her confidential friend's secret annoyance, it even troubled her conscience, for she was a good girl, and painfully aware, from Ruskin and contemporary fiction, how entirely men's activities are determined by women's attitudes. And if Hill never by any chance mentioned the topic of love to her, she only credited him with the finer modesty for that omission. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Portsmouth. The exterior of the mansion as it looks to-day does not of itself live up to one's preconceived idea of colonial magnificence. A rambling collection of buildings, seemingly the result of various "L" expansions, form an inharmonious whole which would have made Ruskin quite mad. The site is, however, charming, for the place commands a view up and down Little Harbour, though concealed by an eminence from the road. The house is said to have originally contained as many as fifty-two rooms. If so, it has shrunk in recent years. But there is ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... industrial problem. The real question is woman's dependence upon man as the bread-winner. So long as that dependence exists there will be weakness. No individual can stand at their strongest and best while leaning upon some other. I believe with Browning and Ruskin that the development of personality is the goal ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... What John Ruskin said in his famous historic essay applies to Russia: "I found that all the great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war." Every great Russian reform has taken place suddenly as a consequence of some ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... the City Companies, and the necessary enlargements and improvements were set on foot. Some of the earlier students were very young, but in 1858 the age of admission was raised to eighteen. From time to time the buildings have been enlarged. Mr. Ruskin instituted in 1880 a May Day Festival, to be held annually, and as long as he lived, he himself presented to the May Queen a gold cross and chain, and distributed to her comrades some of his volumes. Mr. Ruskin also presented to the college many ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... house in a good park has not often in itself much of the picturesque. Ruskin would not consider Glanyravon, with its heavy porch, massive square walls, and innumerable long windows, a good specimen of architectural beauty; still it is a most comfortable dwelling, beautifully ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... finally, as the children grew older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange mixture—Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens, Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Moliere, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,—the children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their temperaments and ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... sheets have been passing through the press. I have also to thank those who have been kind enough to offer letters in their possession for inclusion in these volumes: Lady Alwyne Compton for the letters to Mr. Westwood; Mrs. Arthur Severn for the letters to Mr. Ruskin; Mr. G.L. Craik for the letters to Miss Mulock; Mrs. Commeline for the letters to Miss Commeline; Mr. T.J. Wise for the letters to Mr. Cornelius Mathews; Mr. C. Aldrich for the letter to Mrs. Kinney; Col. T.W. Higginson for a ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... addressed to Miss MARY GLADSTONE before and after her marriage to Mr. DREW. Sitting at the centre she seems to have held together her circle by golden threads of confidence and intimacy. Here you will learn how RUSKIN was brought to visit Hawarden, and how he entirely altered his views on Mr. GLADSTONE, going so far as to suppress a number of Fors Clavigera in which slighting allusion had been made to him. Here, too, you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 26, 1917 • Various
... night. I knew in a moment that the aumonier was right, and that I must get the lad away at once from the intoxicant which nature poured out over this far-away city. His eyes were shining feverishly, and when I mentioned Mr. Ruskin in a casual way he looked ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... between those two great branches, prose and poetry. For prose may have rhythm. All that can be said is that verse will scan, while prose will not. The difference is purely formal. Very few poets have succeeded in being so poetical as Isaiah, Sir Thomas Browne, and Ruskin have been in prose. It can only be stated that, as a rule, writers have shown an instinctive tendency to choose verse for the expression of the very highest emotion. The supreme literature is in verse, but the finest achievements in prose approach so nearly to the finest achievements in ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... blind him to defects, did not seduce him into indiscriminate praise, did not deter him from exposing the tendency to verbiage in Burke and Jeremy Taylor, the excessive blankness of much of Wordsworth's blank verse, the undercurrent of mediocrity in Macaulay, the absurdities of Ruskin's etymology. And, as in great matters, so in small. Whatever literary production was brought under his notice, his judgment was clear, sympathetic, and independent. He had the readiest appreciation of true excellence, a quick eye for minor merits of facility and method, a severe intolerance ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... are known throughout the world. The picture by which he established his fame was one of this class, originally painted for a chapel in San Giobbe, but now hanging in the Venice Academy. Ruskin has pronounced it "one of the greatest pictures ever painted in Christendom in her central art power." It is a large composition, with three saints at each side, and three ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... giving Ruskin the go-by. "And why don't you come in our gondola? You don't want all that ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... the proper development of constitutional life that the dominant Liberal doctrines should be opposed by this bold criticism. Bismarck was only doing what in England was done by the young Disraeli, by Carlyle, and by Ruskin; the world would not be saved ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... jurisdiction of the church; and the other is the reference to usury. Mind you, usury is interest. It didn't mean excessive interest, as it does now. As you probably know, the notion prevailed in the early Middle Ages that all usury—interest—was a sin and wrong; and even Ruskin has chapter after chapter arguing that principle, that it is wrong to take interest for money. I should perhaps add another reason why interest was so disliked in early England: There was very little money in early England; and it mostly belonged to the Jews. It was a good ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... has the fair South in recent times called to her—Stephenson, Ruskin, Carlyle, Mill, Gladstone and others—but never before or since, one whose work was the transformation ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... where the fool shall not err, and the sage may find the realisation of his far-seeking; and yet, despite its inclusiveness, it is a belief which cannot save the birds from destruction, the silent mountains from advertisement, or the stream from pollution, in an avowedly Christian land. John Ruskin scolded and fought and did yeoman service, somewhat hindered by his over-good conceit of himself; but it is not the worship of beauty we need so much as the beauty of holiness. Little by little the barrier grows and 'religion' becomes a RULE of life, not life itself, although the Bride ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... transfigured phrase,' replied the poet, 'is worth all your scientific dictionaries and logic threshing-machines put together. Ruskin was in error. He tells us that Milton always meant what he said, and said exactly ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... most splendid pyrotechnics conceivable. Imagine fifty mountains as high as Etna, three of them with smoking craters, standing along the road between New York and Washington, and you will have some idea of the ride down this gigantic colonnade from Quito to Riobamba. If, as Ruskin says, the elements of beauty are in proportion to the increase of mountainous character, Ecuador is artistically beautiful to a ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... plenty of time. The place makes a little vignette, leaves an impression—the quiet white house in its garden on the road by the wide, clear river, without the smoke, the bustle, the ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It struck me as an effort Mr. Ruskin might have inspired and Mr. William Morris—though that be much to ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... fallacy somewhere at the root; whether it be useful and operative, as many a legal fiction is operative, for good; or senile, past service yet tyrannous by custom, and so pernicious; or merely foolish, as certain artistic conventions are traceable, when a Ruskin comes to judgment, back to nothing better than folly: and it becomes men of honest mind, in dealing with anything recognisable as a convention, to examine its accepted fallacy, whether it be well understood or ill understood; ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... than the determination to see through nature, to pass beyond the actual to the abstract, and to use reality only as a stepping-stone to the ideal. This artistic Platonism was the source both of his greatness and his mannerism. As men choose to follow Blake or Ruskin, they may praise or blame him; yet, blame and praise pronounced on such a matter with regard to such a man are equally impertinent and insignificant. It is enough for the critic to note with reverence that thus and thus the spirit that was in ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds |
