Tribute to My Man

...He shared the fate of the prophet. He moved as the one man who had eyes in the country of the blind, and the one desire of the blind men was to reduce him to a condition similar to their own. He was not limited, by just the survey of the immediate surroundings in the time and place in which they lived. He looked across the centuries, saw cities rise and fall, forms of civilization organized by man remote and different from the civilization of Westmorland, or Wakefield, or Westminster; and he refused to believe that this particular, and as he thought, wrong direction taken by a certain section of the human race, whom all the while that they were marching to ruin, were crowning themselves with flowers and hailing themselves as immortal, was the last word in the dealings of God with man...

... He had seen the people round him like the man with the muckrake in the parable, with every kind of glory, and beauty, and nobility of life offered them freely, still with heads averted, raking together the sticks, and the small stones, and the dust of the floor. He saw the possibility of gentleness and courage, and compassion torn to pieces and lost in the mad struggle partly for wealth and partly for mere existence in a society which was less a civilization than a sham. He proclaimed it and in proclaiming it, he gave everything that a man can give. Let us not in our turn refuse to do him honour.

Ruskin the Prophet, page 59