pipes in frosty weather. Lastly, the cellar ought to have been treble the size it now is, and should have had a stove in it, for warming the house through gratings in the ceiling. I cannot recollect anything else I should like changed, except that I should like to have had a little more money to spend upon making the rooms loftier and larger. "Now for what I have gained. We have been perfectly dry during all this winter, for the walls are solid, and impervious even to horizontal rain. They are jacketed from the top of the ground-floor upwards with red tiles, which are the best waterproof covering I know, infinitely preferable to the unhealthy-looking suburban stucco. Peace has been secured. Not altogether, because a man must have a very large domain if he is to protect himself utterly against neighbours who will keep peacocks, or yelping curs which are loose in the garden all night. But the anguish of the piano next door fitting into the recess next to my wall,-worse still, the anguish of expectation when the piano was not playing, are gone. I go to bed when I like, without having to wait till my neighbours go to bed also. All these, however, are obvious advantages. There is one, not quite so obvious, on which I wish particularly to insist. I have got a home. The people about me inhabit houses, but they have no homes, and I observe that they invite one another to their places.' Their houses are certain portions of infinite space, in which they are placed for the time being, and they feel it would be slightly absurd to call them 'homes.' I can hardly reckon up the advantages which arise from living in a home, rather than a villa, or a shed, or whatever you like to call it, on a three years' agreement, or as an annual tenant. The sacredness of the family bond is strengthened. The house becomes the outward and visible sign of it, the sacramental sign of it. All sorts of associations cluster round it, of birth, of death, of sorrow, and of joy. Furthermore, there seems to be an addition of permanence to existence. One reason why people generally like castles and cathedrals is because they abide, and contradict that sense of transitoriness which is so painful to us. The house teaches carefulness. A man loves his house, and does not brutally damage plaster or paint. He takes pains to decorate it as far as he can, and is not selfishly anxious to spend nothing on what he cannot take away when he moves. My counsel, therefore, to everybody who can scrape together enough money to make a beginning is to build. Those who are not particularly sensitive, will at least gain solid benefits, for which they will be thankful; and those with a little more soul in them will become aware of subtle pleasures and the growth of sweet and subtle virtues, which, to say the least, are not promoted by villas. Of course I know it will be urged that estimates will be exceeded, and that housebuilding leads to extravagance. People who are likely to be led into extravagance, and can never say 'No,' should not build. They may live anywhere, and I have nothing to say to them. But really the temptation to spend money foolishly in house-building is not greater than the temptation to walk past shop windows. "I am, Sir, etc. "W. HALE WHITE." 24. (VI.) "Pardon the correction, but I think you were not quite right in saying in a recent Fors that the spiral line could be drawn by the hand and eye only. Mr. F. C. Penrose, whose work on the Parthenon you referred to in one of your earlier books, showed me some time ago a double spiral he had drawn with a 3 [Formerly a clerk in the Admiralty: see his letter in Dilecta, § 18. Author (under the pseudonym Mark Rutherford) of The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, The Revolution in Tanner's Lane, and other works.] 2 [See Letter 62, § 14 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 525).] 3 [See Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. v. § 12 (Vol. X. p. 153 n.).] machine of his own devising, and also a number of other curves (cycloidal, conchoidal, and cissoidal, I think) drawn in the same way, and which latter, he said he believed, had never been drawn with absolute accuracy before." My correspondent has misunderstood me. I never said "the spiral" but this spiral, under discussion. I have no doubt the machines are very ingenious. But they will never draw a snail-shell, nor any other organic form. All beautiful lines are drawn under mathematical laws organically transgressed, and nothing can ever draw these but the human hand. If Mr. Penrose would make a few pots with his own hand on a potter's wheel, he would learn more of Greek art than all his measurements of the Parthenon have taught him. F XXIX. " LETTER 76 OUR BATTLE IS IMMORTAL1 VENICE, Sunday, 4th March, 1877. Μάχη δή, φαμέν, ἀθάνατός ἐστιν ἡ τοιαύτη . . . ξύμμαχοι δὲ ἡμῖν θεοί τε ἅμα καὶ δαίμονες, ἡμεῖς δ ̓ αὖ κτήματα θεῶν καὶ δαιμόνων, φθείρει δὲ ἡμᾶς ἀδικία καὶ ὕβρις μετὰ ἀφροσύνης, σώζει δὲ δικαιοσύνη καὶ σωφροσύνη μετὰ φρονήσεως, ἐν ταῖς τῶν θεῶν ἐμψύχοις οἰκοῦσαι δυνάμεσι.” 1. "WHEREFORE, our battle is immortal; and the Gods and the Angels fight with us: and we are their possessions. And the things that destroy us are injustice, insolence, and foolish thoughts; and the things that save us are justice, self-command, and true thought, which things dwell in the living powers of the Gods."2 This sentence is the sum of the statement made by Plato in the tenth book of the Laws respecting the relations of the will of man to the Divine creative power. Statement which is in all points, and for ever, true; and ascertainably so by every man who honestly endeavours to be just, temperate, and true. I will translate and explain it throughout, in due time; *3 * For the present, commending only to those of my Oxford readers who may be entering on the apostleship of the Gospel of Dirt, this following sentence, with as much of its context as they have time to read : “ὃ πρῶτον γενέσεως καὶ φθορᾶς αἴτιον ἁπάντων, τοῦτο οὐ πρῶτον ἀλλὰ ὕστερον ἀπεφήναντο εἶναι γεγονὸς οι τὴν τῶν ἀσεβῶν ψυχὴν ἀπεργασάμενοι λόγοι, ὃ δέ ὕστερον πρότερον, ὅθεν ἡμαρτήκασι περὶ θεῶν τῆς ὄντως οὐσίας.” ["Epistle of Jude" (see §§ 13 seq.) was a rejected title for this Letter.] [Laws, x. 906 A. The Greek passage in the note is from 891 E, thus translated by Jowett: "They affirm that which is the first cause of the generation and destruction of all things, to be not first but last, and that which was last to be first, and hence they have fallen into error about the true nature of the Gods." The further passage translated in the text is from 902.] 3 [This, however, was not done.] 4 [See Letter 75, § 22 (p. 79).] but am obliged to refer to it here hastily, because its introduction contains the most beautiful and clear pre-Christian expression at present known to me, of the law of Divine life in the whole of organic nature, which the myth of St. Theodore taught in Christian philosophy. I give one passage of it as the best preface to the matters I have to lay before you in connection with our beginning of real labour on English land (announced, as you will see, in the statement of our affairs for this month 2) : "Not, therefore, Man only, but all creatures that live and die, are the possessions of the Gods, whose also is the whole Heaven. "And which of us shall say that anything in the lives of these is great, or little, before the Gods? for it becomes not those to whom we belong, best and carefullest of possessors, to neglect either this or that. "For neither in the hands of physician, pilot, general, nor householder, will great things prosper if he neglect the little; nay, the stonemason will tell you that the large stones lie not well without the small: shall we then think God a worse worker than men, who by how much they are themselves nobler, by so much the more care for the perfectness of all they do; and shall God, the wisest, because it is so easy to care for little things, therefore not care for them, as if He were indolent or weary?" 2. Such preface befits well the serious things I have to say to you, my Sheffield men, to-day. I had them well in my mind when I rose, but find great difficulty in holding them there because of the rattling of the steamcranes of the huge steamer, Pachino. Now, that's curious: I look up to read her name on her bow-glittering in the morning sun, within thirty paces of me; and, behold, it has St. George's shield and cross on it;* the first ship's bow I ever saw with a knight's shield for its bearing. I must bear with her cranes as best I may. It is a right omen, for what I have to say in especial to the little company of you, who are minded, as I hear, * At least, the sharp shield of crusading times, with the simple cross on it-St. George's in form, but this the Italian bearing reversed in tincture, gules, the cross argent. out of your steam-crane and all other such labour in Sheffield, pestilent to the enduring Sabbath of human peace on earth and goodwill towards men,' to take St. George's shield for your defence in Faith, and begin truly the quiet work and war-his, and all the saints-cleaving the wide "seas of Death, and sunless gulfs of Doubt." 2 3. Remember, however, always that seas of Death must mean antecedent seas of Life; and that this voice, coming to you from the laureated singer of England, prophesying in the Nineteenth Century,* does truly tell you what state Britannia's ruled waves have at present got into under her supremely wise ordination. I wonder if Mr. Tennyson, of late years, has read any poetry but his own; or if, in earlier years, he never read, with attention enough to remember, words which most other good English scholars will instantly compare with his somewhat forced-or even, one might say, steam-craned, rhyme, to "wills," "Roaring moon of-Daffodils." Truly, the nineteenth century altogether, and no less in Midsummer than March, may be most fitly and pertinently described as a "roaring moon": but what has it got to do with daffodils, which belong to lakes of Life, not Death? Did Mr. Tennyson really never read the description of that golden harbour in the little lake which my Companions and I have been striving to keep the nineteenth century from changing into a cesspool with a beach of broken ginger-beer bottles? "The waves beside them danced; but they Outdid the sparkling waves in glee. A poet could not but be gay In such a jocund company." * The sonnet referred to begins, I hear, the periodical so named. 1 [Luke ii. 14.] [From Tennyson's Prefatory Sonnet to the Nineteenth Century (March 1877).] [Ruskin, as appears from his note, had not yet seen the magazine; he quotes from some newspaper. Tennyson wrote "will" and "daffodil."] [Wordsworth, Poems of the Imagination, “I wandered lonely as a cloud" (1804). The poet states in a prefatory note that "the daffodils grew and still grow on the margin of Ullswater, but that the poem was written at Grasmere; and Ruskin here |