Meynell, Alice: John Ruskin (Edinburgh , London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1901)

CHAPTER V.
‘MODERN PAINTERS.’
THE FIFTH VOLUME (i860).
The last volume of this enormous work of thought,
imagination, sincerity, and devotion is chiefly a con-
tinuation of the study of natural landscape, of form
in the leaf, anatomy in the branch; of the play of
these creatures of earth with the light from the skies,
and the unimaginable shadows that “ stumble over
everything they come across ” — a world of its own
that of the experimental shadow! This volume
is a study of the whole garden : “ How have we
ravaged instead of kept it! ” and of the unalterable
skies. The more intent the study is, the more im-
passioned — a look of adoration at arm’s length, a
kiss at close quarters. The large sense of vegetation,
that unsuffering creature, with its youth, age, death
perpetually rehearsed, grows yet more poetic when it
is the little will of the bud to grow to a pinnacle that
Ruskin looks into, with his incomparably lovely botany.