JOHN RUSKIN. WITHIN a few days of the completion of his eighty-first year, death crowned the labors of John Ruskin, and he entered the company of the immortals. There is no Englishman of his intellectual and moral stature left alive; his peers have all gone before him, and the last of the great spirits who shaped for the Victorian age its ethical and æsthetical ideals has been gathered to his rest. 'As he willed, he worked: And, as he worked, he wanted not, be sure, His life was so complete, so filled with manifold serviceable activities, so rich in the garner of life's best fruits, that we cannot deplore his death, however sincere our mourning, but must rather be touched with a deep solemnity at the thought of what he did and what he was, mingled with a deep gratitude for the example of his consecrated days. His work for mankind was ended a full decade ago, and the peaceful hours that were given him after his pen had been laid aside removed him so entirely from any sort of contact with the active world that his continued bodily presence among men has been difficult to realize. The soul that's tutelary now Till time end, o'er the world to teach and bless' has seemed to us hardly more than a disembodied spirit since the year when those Præterita' which we were reading with such eager interest met with their final interruption, and became themselves things of that past with which they were concerned. John Ruskin was born in London on the eighth of February, 1819. He died on the twentieth of January, 1900, at his Lake Country home, Brantwood, in Coniston, where something like the last score of his years were spent. His intellectual activity covers a period of nearly sixty years, for his precocity was marked, and he wrote creditable verses at the age of ten or thereabouts. At fifteen we find him contributing to a periodical of popular science papers with such titles as Enquiries on the Causes of the Color ༦ of the Water of the Rhine' and Facts and Considerations on the Strata of Mont Blanc.' From this time until his physical breakdown at the age of seventy, there is no year that does not add its title or titles to the bibliography of his writings, the mere list of which, without comment, would nearly, if not quite, fill up all the space here at our command. And what memories these titles evoke in the minds of men and women to whom the message of Ruskin has come as a veritable new gospel of beauty and the conduct of life! They think of Modern Painters,' 'The Stones of Venice,' The Seven Lamps of Architecture,' and recall the quickened vision, the new appreciation, the deepened insight, which the reading of these books has brought them when viewing the cities and the galleries of Europe. They think of Sesame and Lilies' and The Queen of the Air,' and recall the stimulus and the fresh inspiration that these books have brought to the study of literature. They think of The Crown of Wild Olive' and 'The Ethics of the Dust,' and recall their realization of the unity of truth and goodness and beauty, their first sense of the fashion in which the cul |