III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS 105

and glorious verse in Isaiah, speaking of the cedars on the mountains as rejoicing over the fall of the king of Assyria: “Yea, the fir trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, Since thou art gone down to the grave, no feller is come up against us.”¹ See what sympathy there is here, as if with the very hearts of the trees themselves. So also in the words of Christ, in His personification of the lilies: “They toil not, neither do they spin.” Consider such expressions as, “The sea saw that, and fled. Jordan was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams; and the little hills like lambs.” Try to find anything in profane writing like this; and note farther that the whole book of Job appears to have been chiefly written and placed in the inspired volume in order to show the value of natural history, and its power on the human heart.² I cannot pass by it without pointing out the evidences of the beauty of the country that Job inhabited.* Observe, first, it was an arable country. “The oxen were ploughing and the asses feeding beside

* This passage, respecting the book of Job, was omitted in the delivery of the Lecture, for want of time.

¹ [Isaiah xiv. 8. Ruskin refers to the passage again in Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xii. § 14. The subsequent Bible references are Matthew vi. 28; Psalms cxiv. 3; Job i. 14, vi. 15-17, ix. 30, viii. 16, 17, v. 23, xiv. 18, v. 9, xxviii. 9.]

² [Ruskin had been studying the Book of Job carefully: see Vol. X. p. xxxviii. In a letter to his farther from Venice (Nov. 2, 1851), he wrote:-

“By-the-bye, I have been making up my mind that the land of Uz, in which Job lived, must have been close under Lebanon or Caucasus, or in some place at the feet of snowy mountains. All his imagery is that of a mountaineer, but especially the way he dwells on the passing away of the ‘snow waters,’ (ch. vi. 15-18, ch. xxiv. 19, ch. xii. 15), and all the imagery of ch. xxviii. 4-6, 7, 10, 11, and ch. xiv. 18-19, is exactly that which would occur to a man living in such a place as the valley of St. Martin’s. You know how I was disappointed in the autumn when I went to look for my favourite spring at Maglans, that comes out of the limestone strong enough to turn a mill, and there was nothing but the dry stones: it was ‘snow waters.’ So even the ‘great wind from the wilderness,’ destroying the house where his sons were feasting [ch. i. 19], was evidently a mountain blast; for in the margin you see it is not ‘from the wilderness’ but ‘from aside,’ just the expression which Aristophanes uses of wind coming down the hills. I think if you will put Job in among the mountains, the whole book will read much more grandly.”

The reference to Aristophanes is to The Clouds, 325; the passage is cited and discussed in Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 26 n.). There are frequent references to the landscape of the Book of Job in vols. iii., iv., and v. of Modern Painters: see General Index.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]