INTRODUCTION li

la Sizeranne delivered an eloquent discourse. Its concluding words may here be quoted:-

“Gentlemen, thanks to you, the sailors of the future will see again the Tower of St. Mark clear on the horizon-that wonderful straight column that our eyes always sought, that they seek, but in vain, to-day, which rises from the soil of your city like a beam of light sent from the earth to heaven. You have already begun the work; we can hear, from this place, the rattling of the hammers on the stone. We may hope that it will ere long be accomplished. To-day, however, you are engrossed with another monument. Your memory recalls the great figure of Ruskin to your imaginations, and from henceforth, so you will it, we shall meet that figure everywhere, at the threshold of St. Mark as at the Tower of Torcello, near the Madonna of the Garden as at the foot of the dead Doges at San Zanipolo.

“And this monument that you raise to Ruskin, immaterial as it is, has no need to fear the fate of the Campanile. Whatever earthquakes may befall, it will for ever appear clear, luminous to the navigator (and we are all navigators), to the men of the twentieth century who seek for a lighthouse and a port.

“Our eyes will see it-never. Our hearts will find it everywhere.”¹

Last among the memorials to Ruskin comes the present edition of his Life, Letters, and Works.²

II

We now turn to the book which is printed in the present volume-the last of Ruskin’s works, Præterita. For this work, the world is partly indebted to Professor Norton, at whose suggestion it was that Ruskin resolved to continue the autobiographical reminiscences, commenced incidentally in Fors Clavigera, and to make them into a separate book. The book as we have it is not carried so far as Ruskin had hoped and designed; but even in its design, it was never intended to be a complete and systematic account of the author’s life. The full title explains the more modest scheme with which he took up the task. It was to give, of the Past,³ “Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts perhaps

¹ Ruskin at Venice: a Lecture given during the Ruskin Commemoration at Venice, September 21, 1905, by Robert de la Sizeranne, translated by Mrs. Frederic Harrison (George Allen, 1906), pp. 69, 70.

² The present volume concludes the Life and Works. The two next volumes are occupied by his Letters.

³ Præterita, as the title of a book, had been anticipated in 1863, when it was given to a volume of verse by “W. P. Lancaster” (pseudonym for John Byrne Leicester Warren, Baron de Tabley).

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