not only upon seeing, but upon _not seeing_. In the distant star, all
foulness and gloom are lost, and only the pure splendor reaches us.
Inspired by Mr. Ruskin's eloquence, the neophyte sets forth with
contrition to put his precepts into practice. But the counterstatement
which he had overlooked does not, therefore, cease to exist. At the
outset, he finds unexpected sacrifices are demanded. And, as money is
the common measure of the forces disposable, the hindrances take the
form of increase of cost. Before the first step can be taken towards
doing anything as Mr. Ruskin would have it done, he discovers that at
least it will cost enormously more to do it in that way. The lamps of
truth and sacrifice demand such expensive nourishment, that he is forced
to ask himself whether they are of themselves really sufficient to live
by.

It is not that we are poorer or more penurious than our ancestors, but
that we have more wants than they, and that the new wants overshadow the
old. What is spent in one direction must be spared in another. The
matter-of-course necessaries of our life were luxuries or were unknown
to them. First of all, the luxury of freedom,--political, social, and
domestic,--with the habits it creates, is the source of great and
ever-increasing expense. We are still much behindhand in this matter,
and shall by-and-by spend more largely upon it. But, compared with our
ancestors, individual culture, to which freedom is the means, absorbs a
large share of our expenditure. The noble architecture of the thirteenth
century was the work of corporations, of a society that knew only
corporations, and where individual culture was a crime. Dante had made
the discovery that it is the man that creates his own position, not the
accident of birth. But his life shows how this belief isolated him. Nor
was the coincidence between the artistic spirit of the age and its
limitations accidental. Just in proportion as the spirit of