confess that we have learned more of Greece . out of the crumbled fragments of her sculpture than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians. And if indeed there be any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy in the thought of being remembered hereafter, which can give strength to present exertion, or patience to present endurance, there are two duties respecting national architecture whose importance it is impossible to overrate; the first, to render the architecture of the day historical; and the second, to preserve, as the most precious of inheritances, that of past ages.

given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fath ers' honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only. And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital-upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone-upon those gloomy rows of formalized minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar-not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck. in their native ground; that those com

It is in the first of these two directions that Memory may truly be said to be the Sixth Lamp of Architecture; for it is in becoming memorial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by civil and domestic buildings; and this partly as they are, with such a view, built in a more stable manner, and partly as their decorations are consequently animated by a metaphor-fortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs ical or historical meaning.

of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark the time when every man's aim is to be in some more elevated sphere than his natural one, and every man's past life is his habitual scorn; when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt, and the crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

As regards domestic buildings, there must always be a certain limitation to views of this kind in the power, as well as in the hearts, of men; still I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins; and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to sympathize in, all their honour, their gladness or their suffering,-that this, with all the record it bare of them, and of all material things that This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; it they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp is ominous, infectious, and fecund of other fault of themselves upon was to be swept away, as and misfortune. When men do not love their soon as there was room made for them in the Learths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, sign that they have dishonoured both, and that no affection felt for it, no good to be drawn they have never acknowledged the true univerfrom it by their children; that though there was sality of that Christian worship which was ina monument in the church, there was no warm deed to supersede the idolatry, but not the piety, monument in the heart and house to them; that of the pagan. Our God is a household God, all that they ever treasured was despised, and as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in the places that had sheltered and comforted every man's dwelling; let men look to it when them were dragged down to the dust. I say they rend it lightly and pour out its ashes. It that a good man would fear this; and that, far is not a question of mere ocular delight, it is more, a good son, a noble descendant, would no question of intellectual pride, or of cultivated fear doing it to his father's house. I say that and critical fancy, how, and with what aspect if men lived like men indeed, their houses would of durability and of completeness, the domestic be temples-temples which we should hardly buildings of a nation shall be raised. It is dare to injure, and in which it would make us one of those moral duties, not with more imholy to be permitted to live; and there must be punity to be neglected because the perception a strange dissolution of natural affection, a of them depends on a finely toned and balanced strange unthankfulness for all that homes have conscientiousness, to build our dwellings with

care, and patience, and fondness, and diligent completion, and with a view to their duration at least for such a period as, in the ordinary course of national revolutions, might be supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the direction of local interests. This at the least; but it would be better if, in every possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate rather with their condition at the commencement, than their attainments at the termination, of their worldly career; and built them to stand as long as human work at its strongest can be hoped to stand; recording to their children what they have been, and from what, if so it had been permitted them, they had risen. And when houses are thus built, we may have that true domestic architecture, the beginning of all other, which does not disdain to treat with respect and thoughtfulness the small habitation as well as the large, and which invests with the dignity of contented manhood the narrowness of worldly circumstance.

which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close, of the last chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the lonely island church, fitly named "St. the sun declined behind the belfry tower of George of the Seaweed." As the boat drew had just left sank behind him into one long, nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller brushwood and willows; but at what seemed low, sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced three smooth surges of inferior hill extended on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or themselves about their roots, and beyond these, the rush of the arrival in the railway station beginning with the craggy peaks above Viis perhaps not always, or to all men, an equiv-horizon to the north-a wall of jagged blue, cenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole alent,-in those days, I say, when there was something more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder, there were few moments of which the recollection was fondly cherished by the traveller, than that * In this "faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne," we have both an illustration of Ruskin's descriptive and narrative powers, and an expression of the deep religious convictions which informed his earlier writings. In the selection that follows will be found his defence and praise of Gothic art, together 1 bell-towers (Murano is an island just north of with his central social theory.

FROM THE STONES OF VENICE. THE THRONE. VOLUME II, CHAPTER I* In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long hoped for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset-hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which

more

here and there showing through its clefts a

wilderness

back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself of misty precipices, fading far rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow into mighty the barred clouds of evening, one after anfragments of peaked light, standing up behind other, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles1 of Murano, and on the great city,

Venice.)

where it magnified itself along the waves, as by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew on the iron line; and though many of her nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls palaces are forever defaced, and many in desewere reached, and the outmost of its untrod- crated ruins, there is still so much of magic den streets was entered, not through towered in her aspect that the hurried traveller, who gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet must leave her before the wonder of that first between two rocks of coral in the Indian sea; aspect has been worn away, may still be led to when first upon the traveller's sight opened forget the humility of her origin, and to shut the long ranges of columned palaces,-each his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, with its black boat moored at the portal,- at least, are little to be envied, in whose hearts each with its image cast down beneath its feet the great charities of the imagination lie dead, upon that green pavement which every breeze and for whom the fancy has no power to rebroke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; press the importunity of painful impressions, when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, or to raise what is ignoble, and disguise what the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve is discordant, in a scene so rich in its rememslowly forth from behind the palace of the brances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for Camerlenghi ; that strange curve, so delicate, this work of the imagination there must be no so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, permission during the task which is before us. graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before The impotent feelings of romance, so singu its moonlike circumference was all risen, the larly characteristic of this century, may indeed gondolier's cry, "Ah! Stali,'' struck sharp gild, but never save, the remains of those upon the ear, and the prow turned aside un- mightier ages to which they are attached like der the mighty cornices that half met over the climbing flowers; and they must be torn away narrow canal, where the plash of the water from the magnificent fragments, if we would followed close and loud, ringing along the see them as they stood in their own strength. marble by the boat's side; and when at last Those feelings, always as fruitless as they are that boat darted forth upon the breadth of fond, are in Venice not only incapable of prosilver sea, across which the front of the Ducal tecting, but even of discerning, the objects to Palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks which they ought to have been attached. The to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation,4 Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing it was no marvel that the mind should be of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, so deeply entranced by the visionary charm a stage dream which the first ray of daylight of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose forget the darker truths of its history and its name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow being. Well might it seem that such a city deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge had owed her existence rather to the rod of of Sighs," which is the centre of the Byronic the enchanter than the fear of the fugitive; ideal of Venice;5 no great merchant of Venice that the waters which encircled her had been ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller chosen for the mirror of her state, rather than now passes with breathless interest; the statue the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which which Byron makes Faliero address as one of his in nature was wild or merciless,-Time and great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune Decay, as well as the waves and tempests,- a hundred and fifty years after Faliero 's death;6 had been won to adorn her instead of to de- and the most conspicuous parts of the city have stroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, been so entirely altered in the course of the last that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its three centuries, that if Henry Dandolo or throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as Francis Foscari7 could be summoned from their of the sea. tombs, and stood each on the deck of his galley And although the last few eventful years, at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that refraught with change to the face of the whole nowned entrance, the painter's favourite subearth, have been more fatal in their influence | ject, the novelist's favourite scene, where the on Venice than the five hundred that preceded water first narrows by the steps of the Church them; though the noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only 2 The Bridge of the Rialto, across the Grand

Canal, consists of a single marble arch of 74 feet span and 32 feet in height. Indicating that the gondolier meant to turn to the right.

4 The Church of Santa Maria della Salute, on the right side of the mouth of the Grand Canal.

of La Salute, the mighty Doges would not know in what part of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the

5 See Childe Harold, IV, 1.

6 See Marino Faliero, III, i, 36.

7 Early Doges of Venice; the one was blinded by the Byzantine emperor, the other compelled to abdicate.

great city, for whose sake, and by whose in- continually; the main fact with which we have gratitude, their grey hairs had been brought to do is the gradual transport, by the Po and down with bitterness to the grave. The re- its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of mains of their Venice lie hidden behind the the finer sediment to the sea. The character cumbrous masses which were the delight of the of the Lombardic plain is most strikingly exnation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-pressed by the ancient walls of its cities, comgrown court, and silent pathway, and lightless posed for the most part of large rounded canal, where the slow waves have sapped their Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses foundations for five hundred years, and must of brick; and was curiously illustrated in 1848, soon prevail over them for ever. It must be by the ramparts of these same pebbles thrown our tasks to glean and gather them forth, and up four or five feet high round every field, to restore out of them some faint image of the check the Austrian cavalry in the battle under lost city; more gorgeous a thousand fold than the walls of Verona. The finer dust among that which now exists, yet not created in the which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up day-dream of the prince, nor by the ostentation by the rivers, fed into continual strength by the of the noble, but built by iron hands and Alpine snow, so that, however pure their patient hearts, contending against the adver- waters may be when they issue from the lakes sity of nature and the fury of man, so that at the foot of the great chain, they become of its wonderfulness cannot be grasped by the the colour and opacity of clay before they reach indolence of imagination, but only after frank the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is inquiry into the true nature of that wild and at once thrown down as they enter the sea, solitary scene, whose restless tides and trem-forming a vast belt of low land along the bling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the eastern coast of Italy. The powerful stream city, but long denied her dominion.

of the Po of course builds forward the fastest; When the eye falls casually on a map of on each side of it, north and south, there is a Europe, there is no feature by which it is more tract of marsh, fed by more feeble streams, likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping and less liable to rapid change than the delta loop formed by the junction of the Alps and of the central river. In one of these tracts is Apennines, and enclosing the great basin of built RAVENNA, and in the other VENICE. Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain What circumstances directed the peculiar arupon itself causes a vast difference in the char-rangement of this great belt of sediment in the acter of the distribution of its débris on its earliest times, it is not here the place to inopposite sides. The rock fragments and sedi-quire. It is enough for us to know that from ment which the torrents on the other side of the Alps bear into the plains are distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here and there lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm substrata to appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which descend from the southern side of the High Alps, and from the northern slope of the Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or mountain bay which the two ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks out of their battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer rain washes from their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of the Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary influences which continually depress, or disperse from its surface, the accumulation of the ruins of ages. I will not tax the reader's faith in modern science by insisting on the singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which appears for many centuries to have taken place steadily and B I. e., Ruskin's task, in this intended work on Venetian architecture and sculpture.

the mouths of the Adige to those of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of from three to five miles from the actual shore, a bank of sand, divided into long islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this bank and the true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and other rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighbourhood of Venice, by the sea at high water, to the depth in most places of a foot or a foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at low tide, but divided by an intricate network of narrow and winding channels, from which the sea never retires. In some places, according to the run of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets, consolidated, some by art, and some by time, into ground firm enough to be built upon, or fruitful enough to be cultivated: in others, on the contrary, it has not reached the sea level; so that, at the average low water, shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of seaweed. In the midst of the largest of these, increased in importance 9 Compare what Huxley says on the chalk formation of Europe, p. 670.

by the confluence of several large river channels when every plot of higher ground bears some towards one of the openings in the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, on a crowded cluster of islands; the various plots of higher ground which appear to the north and south of this central cluster, have at different periods been also thickly inhabited, and now bear, according to their size, the remains of cities, villages, or isolated convents and churches, scattered among spaces of open ground, partly waste and encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the metropolis.

fragment of fair building: but, in order to know what it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at evening the windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of the melancholy plain; let him remove, in his imagination, the brightness of the great city that still extends itself in the distance, and the walls and towers from the islands that are near; and so wait, until the bright investiture and sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation. They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be remembered what strange preparation had been made for the things which no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole existence and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or compelled, by the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the sea. Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of the Venetian architecture must have been changed for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary sea-port. Had there been no tide,

The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet (varying considerably with the seasons); but this fall, on so flat a shore, is enough to cause continual movement in the waters, and in the main canals to produce a reflux which frequently runs like a mill stream. At high water no land is visible for many miles to the north or south of Venice, except in the form of small islands crowned with towers or gleaming with villages: there is a channel, some three miles wide, between the city and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide between it and the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which divides the lagoon from the Adriatic, but which is so low as hardly to disturb the impression of the city's having been built in the midst of the ocean, although the secret of its true position is partly, yet not painfully, betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deep-water channels, which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs of huge sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and crowded waves that flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the uplifted level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is seen stand-as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the naring in the midst of a dark plain of seaweed, of gloomy green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or five feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear sea water like the ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves blue gashes upon the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick weed that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning to and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is often profoundly oppressive, even at this day,

ex

row canals of the city would have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the wateraccess to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible: even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps; and the highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow the entrance halls. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily intercourse, must have been done away with. The