But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy; and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's hand, has unlocked for us the doors of an Aladdin's palace! But even if the restraint of the ancient writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity. "This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament; and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook, the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,' 'He doth set His bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every drooping swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love. 'In them hath He set a _tabernacle_ for the sun,' whose burning ball, which, without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by mediatorial ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden pavement is spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the firmament of clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed at evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of the firmament his implacable light is divided and its separated fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His own majesty to men, upon the _throne_ of the firmament. "As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity, we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the Preserver of men those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place. 'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by earth, for it is His footstool.'