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 author 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.