This tour de force has a specific provenance in contemporary hymnody which Ruskin 's first readers would have recognized. Ruskin echoes four famous hymns, all written between 1826 and 1834, when 'literary hymns', strongly influenced by the Romantic movement, featured in a great revival of hymnody within the Church of England. In the early nineteenth century, full use was made of the performative nature of hymns, emphasising the belief that acts of worship in church or chapel are also going on simultaneously in heaven, as in Lyte 's 'Pleasant are Thy courts above', for example. In 'Holy! Holy! Holy!', the rhyming of the durative 'casting' and 'falling' epitomizes this sense of synchronic worship, here 'below' and there 'above'. In the Ruskin passage the present tense is also durative ('heaving', 'rolling', 'kindling'), while the offering of a song of praise by the creation itself echoes the Benedicite from the Book of Common Prayer ('O ye Mountains and Hills, bless ye the Lord'). In God's vast temple of nature, with its purple curtains, columns, altar-smoke, domes, canopy, roof, vault, and companies of angels (the cherubim), a constant but every-varying series of mediations between heaven and earth is enacted. In the description of the feast of the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem (I Kings 8), which Ruskin learnt by heart as a boy, the cloud fills the house of the Lord, and Solomon says: 'Then hear thou in heaven, and forgive the sin of thy servants, and of thy people Israel, that thou teach them the good way wherein they should walk, and give rain upon thy land, which thou hast given to thy people for an inheritance' (v.36). (See Wheeler, Ruskin's God, pp.35-36 and Ruskin and religion.)