of any other English poet; and he has given to our language new beauties and capacities. There is a freshness of creative insight in his work, that raises it to the highest levels of lyrical expression. He has intuition, imagination, artistic method, and charm of expression, in a remarkable degree, In his personal life, in his family relations, in the company of his friends, and in his relations to royalty, in his attitude towards his time and in his sympathy with it, Tennyson is the ideal poet. There is something fine, large, and excellent in his relations to the English public, and in his attitude toward the great reading world which he has addressed through his poetry. No vices or defects have marred his life, no word of reproach can be uttered against him as to his moral and social conduct. His life has been consistent throughout, and in harmony with itself. The dreams of his youth have been fulfilled in old age. He has not outgrown or rejected the ideals of his early manhood. He has, in the largest sense, been true to himself, and done what it was in him to accomplish. THE beautiful is as useful as the practical, perhaps more so. — Victor Hugo. I VENERATE him as one of the great teachers of the day. The grand doctrines of truth and sincerity in art, and the nobleness and solemnity of our human life, which he teaches with the inspiration of a Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a promising way. The two last volumes of "Modern Painters" contain, I think, some of the finest writing of the age. He is strongly akin to the sublimest part of Wordsworth. George Eliot. HE is a great writer, as Rousseau was, — fresh, eloquent, audacious, writing out of the fulness of the present mood, and heedless how far the impulse of to-day may contravene that of yesterday. But as Rousseau was always faithful to his idea of truth, so Ruskin is always faithful to nature. When all his errors and paradoxes and contradictions shall have been utterly forgotten, this will remain to his praise. No man since Wordsworth's brightest days did half so much to teach his countrymen and those who speak his language, how to appreciate that silent nature" which never did betray the heart that loved her." - McCarthy. HE has created a new literature, that of art, and all the subjects related to it; and the work he has done has more genius and is more original than any other prose work of our time.- Stopford Brooke. I WAS much touched with what you say of Ruskin. Anything which makes him doubt his own infallibility will, I am sure, do him good. He is earnest, I am convinced, and will come quite right. — Maurice. WHAT a little way, I thought, has all Ruskin's fire and eloquence made in driving into people so great a truth, a truth so fertile of consequences. -William Morris. III. RUSKIN. ONE of the most characteristic intellectual signs of the times in England is the growth of interest in art. It is a popular movement, reaching to all classes in society, and expressing itself in every possible form. Love of beauty has become a passion and a pursuit. The æsthetic side of life has received an attention it never before commanded in England. The serious temper of the English people has hitherto kept them from that popular appreciation of art which has always existed in Italy and France. The puritan spirit, so long a dominant one, has looked on art as unworthy of men who have a serious purpose and who would give life a moral intent. At the roots of the new growth of æsthetic interest is a changed conception of human nature. So long as the natural in man was looked on as vile and corrupt, as unworthy and debased, so |