Chief among the admirers of Ruskin was William Morris, his junior by fifteen years. Morris was just entering Oxford as Ruskin was publishing The Stones of Venice, the book that first kindled in Morris his social beliefs, to which he always referred as the first statement of the doctrine that art is the expression of man’s pleasure, in labor.
Never forget the material you are working with, and try always to use it for doing what it can do best: if you feel yourself hampered by the material in which you are working, instead of being helped by it, you have so far not learned your business, any more than a would-be poet has, who complains of the hardship of writing in measure and rhyme. (p. 10)