Frondes Agrestes: Readings in 'Modern Painters'Ruskin, John
Philosophy
Frondes Agrestes: Readings in 'Modern Painters'
Ruskin, John
Art; Painting
If, in their remembrance of these things, and in their endeavour to
follow in the footsteps of their Master, religious men of bygone days,
closing themselves in the hill solitudes, forgot sometimes, and
sometimes feared, the duties they owed to the active world, we may
perhaps pardon them more easily than we ought to pardon ourselves, if
we neither seek any influence for good, nor submit to it unsought, in
scenes to which thus all the men whose writings we receive as
inspired, together with their Lord, retired whenever they had any task
or trial laid upon them needing more than their usual strength of
spirit. Nor perhaps should we have unprofitably entered into the mind
of the earlier ages, if among our other thoughts, as we watch the
chains of the snowy mountains rise on the horizon, we should sometimes
admit the memory of the hour in which their Creator, among their
solitudes, entered on His travail for the salvation of our race; and
indulge the dream, that as the flaming and trembling mountains of the
earth seem to be the monuments of the manifesting of His terror on
Sinai, these pure and white hills, near to the heaven, and sources of
all good to the earth, are the appointed memorials of that light of
His mercy, that fell, snowlike, on the Mount of Transfiguration.
FINIS.
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
Edinburgh & London
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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