LETTER FROM MR RUSKIN. 487 



If you could see this, you would not feel that He had 

 set you up as a mark, and spared no arrows. That 

 which has befallen you, though you do not think it, is 

 yet the common lot of man. The earth is full of lost 

 powers ; no human soul perishes, but, if you could only 

 read its true history, you would find that not the 

 thousandth part of its possible work had been done ; 

 that even when the result seemed greatest the man 

 either was or ought to have been conscious of irre- 

 parable failure and shortcoming ; that, in the plurality 

 of cases, the whole end and use of life had been more or 

 less lost, and, in many cases, in the cruelest way, by 

 accident or adversity. And in like manner, if you 

 could only see the origin of all diseases, you would see 

 that what we called a natural disease, and received as 

 an inevitable dispensation, did in reality depend on 

 some pettiest of petty chances (I speak humanly) ; on 

 the man's having untied his neckerchief near a window, 

 when he should not; on his having stopped at the 

 street-corner in an east wind to talk to a friend for half 

 a minute ; on his having worried himself uselessly about 

 an overcharge in a bill ; nothing is so trivial, but it 

 may be the Appointed Death- Angel to the man. And 

 when once you feel this fully (my own work has taught 

 me this more than most men's, for no wreck is so fre- 

 quent, no waste so wild, as the wreck and waste of the 

 minds of men devoted to the arts), when once you feel 

 it, and understand that this waste, which seems so won- 

 derful to us, is intended by the Deity to be a part of 

 his dealing with men (just as the rivers are poured out 

 to run into their swallowing Death-sea, only a lip here 

 and there tasting them), and that this law of chance, 

 which seems so trivial to us, is as entirely in His hand 

 as the lightning and the plague-spot ; then, while to 



