ABSTRACT
The Pisgah sight therefore provides a powerful image of divine mercy, but in Alton Locke another implication almost emerges. Since the dying hero only glimpses a land he cannot live to enter, people are reminded that the Pisgah sight also provides an image of mans failure to achieve their goals be they following the moral law or attaining true freedom. However, the Pisgah sights intrinsic capacity for irony, which appears in so many works of nineteenth-century literature, is here suppressed by Kingsley's emphasis upon Locke's final acceptance and belief. Miltons extension of the Pisgah sight in the last two books of Paradise Lost, Ruskin's manipulation of this type has the viewer here Ruskin himself receive religious knowledge essential to his earthly enterprise. Ruskin's use of the Pisgah-sight structure as a form to present a natural type that is also a metaphorical Pisgah sight has important precedents in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
