JOHN RUSKIN.

RUSKIN, JOHN, an eminent English art-critic and lecturer; born at London, February 8, 1819. He entered Christ Church College, Oxford, where he was graduated in 1842, having, in 1839, gained the Newdigate prize for English poetry. During his undergraduateship he wrote much verse. After graduating he studied art, and acquired much technical skill as a draughtsman, which has served him in illustrating some of his subsequent works. His books on art comprise "Modern Painters" (1843-60); "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849); "The Stones of Venice" (1851-53); “PreRaphaelitism" (1851); “Giotto and his Works in Padua” (1854–60); "Elements of Drawing" (1857); "Political Economy of Art" (1858); "The Two Paths" (1859); "Elements of Perspective" (1859); "Lectures on Art" (1870); "Aratra Pentelici" (1872); "Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret" (1872); "The Laws of Fésole" (1877-79); "The Art of England" (1883); "Verona, and Other Lectures" (1893); "The Poetry of Architecture " (1893); and numerous notes and reports. His many miscellaneous works on ethics, social science, political economy, mythology, botany, etc., published under fanciful titles, include, among others, "Sesame and Lilies" (1865), one of his most popular books; "The Ethics of the Dust" (1866); "The Crown of Wild Olive" (1866); "The Queen of the Air" (1869); "Munera Pulveris" (1872-73); "The Eagle's Nest" (1872); "Love's Meinie" (1873); "Proserpina " (1875-86); "Deucalion " (1875-83); and "St. Mark's Rest" (187784). He also wrote a popular fairy tale, "The King of the Golden River" (1851); "Arrows of the Chace (1880), letters to newspapers; "Præterita," autobiographical (1885-89); "Fors Clavigera " (1871-84), miscellaneous counsels, moral, religious, economic, literary, etc.

THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

(From "The Seven Lamps of Architecture.")

AMONG the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude, as having been marked by more than ordinary fulness of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed,

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now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura. It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, of the Alps; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in the rise of the long low lines of piny hills; the first utterance of those mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their strength is as yet restrained; and the far reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast monotony. The destructive forces and the stern expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn. No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forest; no pale, defiled, or furious rivers send their rude and changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind along their wellknown beds; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too; and all were coming forth in clusters crowded for very love; there was room enough for all, but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer to each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into nebulæ; and there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal. processions of the Mois de Marie, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the edges - ivy as light and lovely as the vine; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places; and in the more open ground, the vetch, and comfrey, and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-colored moss. I came out presently on the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by gray clits of limestone, there was a hawk

sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavored, in order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music; the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colors of human endurance, valor, and virtue; and the crests of the sable hills. that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson.

It is as the centralization and protectress of this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears! how many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition of the old Babel builders was well directed for this world: there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life. The age of Homer is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. Not so that of Pericles: and the day is coming when we shall confess, that we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled