I was the best talker ever seen in Oxford." "And did you find any teacher there like Mahaffy ?" I asked, "any professor with a touch of the poet ?" He came to seriousness at once.
"There were two or three teachers, Frank," he replied, "greater than Mahaffy; teachers of the world as well as of Oxford.

There was Ruskin for instance, who appealed to me intensely--a wonderful man and a most wonderful writer.

A sort of exquisite romantic flower; like a violet filling the whole air with the ineffable perfume of belief.

Ruskin has always seemed to me the Plato of England--a Prophet of the Good and True and Beautiful, who saw as Plato saw that the three are one perfect flower.

But it was his prose I loved, and not his piety.