Excerpt from The Crown of Wild Olive, and the Cestus of Aglaia

Already to idealists of the younger generation the sombre years in which Ruskin wrote have begun to be touched with beauty, and even with romance. The imagination delights to inhabit, as far as it may, that era when the great poets were building up the Elizabethan drama, and now we begin to recall, almost in the same way, the period when Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones were creating in the least romantic of ages the most romantic of all poems or paintings in the story of English art.

Much of their earliest impulse was due to the influence of Ruskin, and all through the time when they were painting and writing he was labouring to evoke, in the English people, a reverence for beauty and a more intelligent religious interest in art. He was never wearied of demonstrating the high position which ought to be given to the arts in the life of a civilised people, for he knew that when a nation adds nothing to the beauty of the world, it is remembered neither clearly nor with affection by the men of after-times. And as we read the lectures in this book it is not easy to realise that their author is no more living, so real and so passionately felt are the words that were spoken half a century ago. Nor in truth for any but those who "make their dullard's distinction between life and books" is Ruskin an influence of the past. His words are the living reflection of a spirit beautiful and fearless. Every page still burns with an unrelenting sincerity, and we cannot put aside the truth if it disturbs us by the assurance that the writer really cares but little for what he declares.

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