To Charles Eliot Norton

CAMBRIDGE, June 30, 1904.

Dear Charles,—I have just read the July "Atlantic," and am so moved by your Ruskin letters that I can't refrain from overflowing. They seem to me immortal documents—as the clouds clear away he will surely take his stable place as one of the noblest of the sons of men. Mere sanity is the most philistine and (at bottom) unimportant of a man's attributes. The chief "cloud" is the bulk of "Modern Painters" and the other artistic writings, which have made us take him primarily as an art-connoisseur and critic. Regard all that as inessential, and his inconsistencies and extravagances fall out of sight and leave the Great Heart alone visible.

Do you suppose that there are many other correspondents of R. who will yield up their treasures in our time to the light? I wish that your modesty had not suppressed certain passages which evidently expressed too much regard for yourself. The point should have been his expression of that sort of thing—no matter to whom addressed! I understand and sympathize fully with his attitude about our war. Granted him and his date, that is the way he ought to have felt, and I revere him perhaps the more for it....

S. W.'s sudden defection is a pathetic thing! It makes one feel like closing the ranks.

Affectionately—to all of you—including Theodora,

W. J.