But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of
intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a
contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy;
and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend
to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of
vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's hand, has unlocked for us the
doors of an Aladdin's palace! But even if the restraint of the ancient
writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great
writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of
simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him
with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so
inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious
outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity.
"This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament;
and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of
these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate
Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook,
the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,' 'He doth set
His bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every
drooping swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love.
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