"
Obedience to the law of Sequence gives strength by giving clearness and
beauty of rhythm; it economises force and creates music. A very
trifling disregard of it will mar an effect. See an example both of
obedience and trifling disobedience in the following passage from
Ruskin:--
"People speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts,
as if houses and lands and food and raiment were alone useful, and as
if Sight, Thought, and Admiration were all profitless, so that men
insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had
their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as
far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than life and
the raiment than the body, who look on earth as a stable and to its
fruit as fodder; vinedressers and husbandmen who love the corn they
grind and the grapes they crush better than the gardens of the angels
upon the slopes of Eden."
It is instinctive to contrast the dislocated sentence, "who would turn,
if they had their way, themselves and their race," with the sentence
which succeeds it, "men who think, as far as such men can be said to
think, that the meat," &c.
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