This book began to assume shape in Ruskin’s mind as early as 1846; he actually wrote it in the six months between November, 1848, and April, 1849.  It is the first of five illustrated volumes embodying the results of seven years devoted to the study of the principles and ideals of Gothic Architecture, the other volumes being The Stones of Venice and Examples of the Architecture of Venice (1851).  In the first edition of The Seven Lamps the plates were not only all drawn but also etched by his own hand.  Ruskin at a later time wrote that the purpose of The Seven Lamps was “to show that certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture had been produced.”  He is really applying here the same tests of truth and sincerity that he employed in Modern Painters.  Chronologically, this volume and the others treating of architecture come between the composition of Volumes II and III of Modern Painters.  Professor Charles Eliot Norton writes that the Seven Lamps is “the first treatise in English to teach the real significance of architecture as the most trustworthy record of the life and faith of nations.”  The following selections form the closing chapters of the volume, and have a peculiar interest as anticipating the social and political ideas which came to colour all his later work.

THE LAMP OF MEMORY

Among the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude, as having been marked by more than ordinary fulness of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura.  It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, of the Alps; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in the rise of the long low lines of piny hills; the first utterance of those mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps.  But their strength is as yet restrained; and the far reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea.  And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast monotony.  The destructive forces and the stern expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn.  No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forest; no pale, defiled, or furious rivers rend their rude and changeful ways among her rocks.  Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind along their well-known beds; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of