As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the
extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is
like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of
the long bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his
ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight
as a bullet. There is no Victorian writer before him to whom he even
suggests a comparison, technically considered, except perhaps De
Quincey; who also employed the long rich rolling sentence that, like a
rocket, bursts into stars at the end. But De Quincey's sentences, as I
have said, have always a dreamy and insecure sense about them, like the
turret on toppling turret of some mad sultan's pagoda. Ruskin's sentence
branches into brackets and relative clauses as a straight strong tree
branches into boughs and bifurcations, rather shaking off its burden
than merely adding to it. It is interesting to remember that Ruskin
wrote some of the best of these sentences in the attempt to show that he
did understand the growth of trees, and that nobody else did--except
Turner, of course.
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