JOHN RUSKIN.

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EXTRACT FROM “THE RING AND THE BOOK.”

Our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind. 
Why take the artistic way to prove so much? 
Because, it is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least. 
How look a brother in the face and say
“Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou, yet art blind,
Thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length,
And, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith!”
Say this as silvery as tongue can troll—­
The anger of the man may be endured,
The shrug, the disappointed eyes of him
Are not so bad to bear—­but here’s the plague,
That all this trouble comes of telling truth,
Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false,
Seems to be just the thing it would supplant,
Nor recognizable by whom it left;
While falsehood would have done the work of truth. 
But Art,—­wherein man nowise speaks to men,
Only to mankind,—­Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word. 
So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall,—­
So, note by note, bring music from your mind,
Deeper than ever the Adante dived,—­
So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye, and save the soul besides.

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SELF-RELIANCE.

1.  To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—­that is genius.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.  Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they all set at naught books and tradition, and spoke not what men but what they thought.

2.  A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.  Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.  In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

3.  Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.  They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.  Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.