Footnote 7, Chapter 2, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. The phrase is from a lecture of 1818 that captures much of Ruskin's intent as I read it: "Now so to place these [images] of nature totalized, and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature, -- this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts. " (Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, II, 258).
Last modified December 2000