[Illustration: AGE 38.
_From a Drawing by G. Richmond, R.A._]
At the age of twenty, Mr. Ruskin, then at Christ Church, Oxford, had
just won the Newdigate prize poem. Two years later the first volume of
"Modern Painters" showed that a new poet had indeed arisen, though a
poet who was destined not to cast his thoughts in verse, but in "the
other harmony of prose." At eight-and-thirty "Stones of Venice" had
appeared. At eight-and-forty (as in our second portrait) he had recently
been elected Rede Lecturer at Cambridge, and was in the height of his
great combat with the world he lives in--a world which, in his eyes, is
given up almost beyond redemption to canters, money-grubbers, inventors
of improved machinery, and every kind of charlatan. In volume after
volume, he was putting forth--in the midst of much which reason found
fantastic--bursts of satire fierce as Juvenal's, and word-pictures more
gorgeous than the tints of Turner, conveyed in that inimitable style
which is as strong and sweet as Shelley's verse. In these latter days
(as our last portrait shows him) Mr. Ruskin, like a prophet in a
hermitage, has become more and more of a recluse, though now and then
his voice is still audible in a wrathful letter to the papers, like a
voice heard crying in the wilderness that all is lost.
[Illustration: AGE 48.
_From a Photo. by Messrs. Elliott & Fry._]
[Illustration: AGE 63. _From a Photo. by Messrs. Elliott & Fry._]