No More Learning

So then while Nature is at all
times pleasant to us, and while the sight and sense of her work
may mingle happily with all our thoughts and labors and times.
of existence, that image of her which the architect carries away
represents what we can only perceive in her by direct intellectual
exertion; and demands from us, wherever it appears, an intel-
lectual exertion of a similar kind in order to understand it and
feel it. It is the written or sealed impression of a thing sought
out; it is the shaped result of inquiry and bodily expression of
thought.
Now let us consider for an instant what would be the effect
of continually repeating an expression of a beautiful thought
to any other of the senses, at times when the mind could not
address that sense to the understanding of it. Suppose that in
time of serious occupation, of stern business, a companion should
repeat in our ears continually some favorite passage of poetry,
over and over again all day long. We should not only soon be
utterly sick and weary of the sound of it, but that sound would
at the end of the day have so sunk into the habit of the ear, that
the entire meaning of the passage would be dead to us, and it
would ever thenceforward require some effort to fix and recover
it. The music of it would not meanwhile have aided the busi-
ness in hand, while its own delightfulness would thenceforward
be in a measure destroyed. It is the same with every other


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JOHN RUSKIN
12519
form of definite thought. If you violently present its expression
to the senses, at times when the mind is otherwise engaged, that
expression will be ineffective at the time, and will have its sharp-
ness and clearness destroyed forever. Much more if you present
it to the mind at times when it is painfully affected or disturbed,
or if you associate the expression of pleasant thought with incon-
gruous circumstances, you will affect that expression thencefor-
ward with a painful color forever.
Apply this to expressions of thought received by the eye.
Remember that the eye is at your mercy more than the ear
"The eye, it cannot choose but see. " Its nerve is not so easily
numbed as that of the ear, and it is often busied in tracing and
watching forms when the ear is at rest. Now if you present
lovely forms to it when it cannot call the mind to help it in its
work, and among objects of vulgar use and unhappy position,
you will neither please the eye nor elevate the vulgar object.
But you will fill and weary the eye with the beautiful form, and
you will infect that form itself with the vulgarity of the thing to
which you have violently attached it. It will never be of much
use to you any more: you have killed or defiled it; its freshness
and purity are gone. You will have to pass it through the fire
of much thought before you will cleanse it, and warm it with
much love before it will revive.
Hence then a general law, of singular importance in the pres-
ent day, a law of simple common-sense,- not to decorate things
belonging to purposes of active and occupied life. Wherever you
can rest, there decorate; where rest is forbidden, so is beauty.
You must not mix ornament with business, any more than you
may mix play. Work first, and then rest. Work first, and then
gaze; but do not use golden plowshares, nor bind ledgers in
enamel. Do not thrash with sculptured flails; nor put bas-reliefs
on millstones. What! it will be asked, are
What! it will be asked, are we in the habit of
doing so? Even so; always and everywhere. The most familiar
position of Greek moldings is in these days on shop fronts.
There is not a tradesman's sign nor shelf nor counter in all the
streets of all our cities, which has not upon it ornaments which
were invented to adorn temples and beautify kings' palaces.
There is not the smallest advantage in them where they are.
Absolutely valueless, utterly without the power of giving pleas
ure, they only satiate the eye and vulgarize their own forms.
Many of these are in themselves thoroughly good copies of fine


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12520
JOHN RUSKIN
things; which things themselves we shall never, in consequence,
enjoy any more. Many a pretty beading and graceful bracket
there is in wood or stucco above our grocers' and cheesemongers'
and hosiers' shops: how is it that the tradesmen cannot under-
stand that custom is to be had only by selling good tea and
cheese and cloth; and that people come to them for their honesty,
and their readiness, and their right wares, and not because they
have Greek cornices over their windows, or their names in large
gilt letters on their house fronts? How pleasurable it would be
to have the power of going through the streets of London, pull-
ing down those brackets and friezes and large names, restoring
to the tradesmen the capital they had spent in architecture, and
putting them on honest and equal terms; each with his name in
black letters over his door, not shouted down the street from the
upper stories, and each with a plain wooden shop casement, with
small panes in it that people would not think of breaking in
order to be sent to prison! How much better for them would it
be, how much happier, how much wiser, to put their trust upon
their own truth and industry, and not on the idiocy of their cus-
tomers! It is curious, and it says little for our national probity
on the one hand, or prudence on the other, to see the whole
system of our street decoration based on the idea that people
must be baited to a shop as moths are to a candle.
But it will be said that much of the best wooden decoration
of the Middle Ages was in shop fronts. No: it was in house
fronts, of which the shop was a part, and received its natural and
consistent portion of the ornament. In those days men lived,
and intended to live, by their shops, and over them, all their
days. They were contented with them and happy in them: they
were their palaces and castles. They gave them therefore such
decoration as made themselves happy in their own habitation,
and they gave it for their own sake. The upper stories were
always the richest; and the shop was decorated chiefly about the
door, which belonged to the house more than to it. And when
our tradesmen settle to their shops in the same way, and form
no plans respecting future villa architecture, let their whole
houses be decorated, and their shops too, but with a national and
domestic decoration. However, our cities are for the most part
too large to admit of contented dwelling in them throughout life:
and I do not say there is harm in our present system of sepa-
rating the shop from the dwelling-house; only where they are so


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JOHN RUSKIN
12521
separated, let us remember that the only reason for shop decora-
tion is removed, and see that the decoration be removed also.
Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day
is to the decoration of the railroad station. Now, if there be
any place in the world in which people are deprived of that
portion of temper and discretion which is necessary to the con-
templation of beauty, it is there. It is the very temple of dis-
comfort; and the only charity that the builder can extend to us.
is to show us, plainly as may be, how soonest to escape from it.
The whole system of railroad traveling is addressed to people
who, being in a hurry, are therefore, for the time being, miser-
able. No one would travel in that manner who could help it,—
who had time to go leisurely over hills and between hedges,
instead of through tunnels and between banks; at least those who
would, have no sense of beauty so acute as that we need consult
it at the station. The railroad is in all its relations a matter
of earnest business, to be got through as soon as possible. It
transmutes a man from a traveler into a living parcel. For the
time, he has parted with the nobler characteristics of his human-
ity for the sake of a planetary power of locomotion. Do not
ask him to admire anything. You might as well ask the wind.
Carry him safely, dismiss him soon: he will thank you for
nothing else. All attempts to please him in any other way are
mere mockery, and insults to the things by which you endeavor
to do so. There never was more flagrant nor impertinent folly
than the smallest portion of ornament in anything concerned
with railroads or near them. Keep them out of the way, take
them through the ugliest country you can find, confess them the
miserable things they are, and spend nothing upon them but for
safety and speed. Give large salaries to efficient servants, large
prices to good manufacturers, large wages to able workmen; let
the iron be tough, and the brickwork solid, and the carriages
strong. The time is perhaps not distant when these first neces-
sities may not be easily met: and to increase expense in any
other direction is madness. Better bury gold in the embank-
ments than put it in ornaments on the stations. Will a single
traveler be willing to pay an increased fare on the South-Western
because the columns of the terminus are covered with patterns
from Nineveh ? - he will only care less for the Ninevite ivories
in the British Museum: or on the North-Western, because there
are Old-English-looking spandrels to the roof of the station at


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12522
JOHN RUSKIN
Crewe? he will only have less pleasure in their prototypes at
Crewe House. Railroad architecture has, or would have, a dig-
nity of its own if it were only left to its work. You would not
put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil.
It is not however only in these marked situations that the
abuse of which I speak takes place. There is hardly, at present,
an application of ornamental work which is not in some sort
liable to blame of the same kind. We have a bad habit of try-
ing to disguise disagreeable necessities by some form of sudden
decoration, which is in all other places associated with such
necessities. I will name only one instance, that to which I have
alluded before the roses which conceal the ventilators in the
flat roofs of our chapels. Many of those roses are of very beau-
tiful design, borrowed from fine works: all their grace and finish
are invisible when they are so placed, but their general form
is afterwards associated with the ugly buildings in which they
constantly occur; and all the beautiful roses of the early French
and English Gothic, especially such elaborate ones as those of
the triforium of Coutances, are in consequence deprived of their
pleasurable influence, and this without our having accomplished
the smallest good by the use we have made of the dishonored
form. Not a single person in the congregation ever receives one
ray of pleasure from those roof roses; they are regarded with
mere indifference, or lost in the general impression of harsh
emptiness.
Must not beauty, then, it will be asked, be sought for in the
forms which we associate with our every-day life? Yes, if you
do it consistently, and in places where it can be calmly seen; but
not if you use the beautiful form only as a mask and covering
of the proper conditions and uses of things, nor if you thrust it
into the places set apart for toil.
Put it in the drawing-room,
not into the workshop; put it upon domestic furniture, not upon
tools of handicraft. All men have sense of what is right in this
matter, if they would only use and apply that sense; every man
knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure, if he would
only ask for it when it does so, and not allow it to be forced
upon him when he does not want it. Ask any one of the pas-
sengers over London Bridge at this instant whether he cares
about the forms of the bronze leaves on its lamps, and he will
tell you, No. Modify these forms of leaves to a less scale, and
put them on his milk-jug at breakfast, and ask him whether he
---


## p. 12523 (#583) ##########################################

JOHN RUSKIN
12523
likes them, and he will tell you, Yes. People have no need of
teaching, if they could only think and speak truth, and ask for
what they like and want, and for nothing else; nor can a right
disposition of beauty be ever arrived at except by this common-
sense, and allowance for the circumstances of the time and place.
It does not follow, because bronze leafage is in bad taste on the
lamps of London Bridge, that it would be so on those of the
Ponte della Trinità; nor because it would be a folly to decorate
the house fronts of Gracechurch Street, that it would be equally
so to adorn those of some quiet provincial town. The question
of greatest external or internal decoration depends entirely on
the conditions of probable repose. It was a wise feeling which
made the streets of Venice so rich in external ornament; for
there is no couch of rest like the gondola. So again, there is
no subject of street ornament so wisely chosen as the fountain,
where it is a fountain of use; for it is just there that perhaps
the happiest pause takes place in the labor of the day, when the
pitcher is rested on the edge of it, and the breath of the bearer
is drawn deeply, and the hair swept from the forehead, and the
uprightness of the form declined against the marble ledge, and
the sound of the kind word or light laugh mixes with the trickle
of the falling water, heard shriller and shriller as the pitcher
fills. What pause is so sweet as that-so full of the depth of
ancient days, so softened with the calm of pastoral solitude?
LANDSCAPES OF THE POETS
From 'Lectures on Architecture and Painting'
Ο
F COURSE all good poetry descriptive of rural life is essen-
tially pastoral, or has the effect of the pastoral, on the
minds of men living in cities: but the class of poetry which
I mean, and which you probably understand, by the term pastoral,
is that in which a farmer's girl is spoken of as a "nymph," and
a farmer's boy as a "swain"; and in which, throughout, a ridicu-
lous and unnatural refinement is supposed to exist in rural life,
merely because the poet himself has neither had the courage to
endure its hardships, nor the wit to conceive its realities. If
you examine the literature of the past century, you will find
that nearly all its expressions having reference to the country
show something of this kind; either a foolish sentimentality or a


## p. 12524 (#584) ##########################################

12524
JOHN RUSKIN
•
morbid fear, both of course coupled with the most curious ignor-
ance. You will find all its descriptive expressions at once vague
and monotonous. Brooks are always "purling"; birds always
"warbling"; mountains always "lift their horrid peaks above the
clouds"; vales always "are lost in the shadow of gloomy woods";
a few more distinct ideas about hay-making and curds and cream,
acquired in the neighborhood of Richmond Bridge, serving to
give an occasional appearance of freshness to the catalogue of the
sublime and beautiful which descended from poet to poet; while
a few true pieces of pastoral, like the 'Vicar of Wakefield' and
Walton's 'Angler,' relieved the general waste of dullness. Even
in these better productions, nothing is more remarkable than the
general conception of the country merely as a series of green
fields, and the combined ignorance and dread of more sublime
scenery; of which the mysteries and dangers were enhanced by
the difficulties of traveling at the period. Thus, in Walton's
'Angler you have a meeting of two friends, one a Derbyshire
man, the other a lowland traveler who is as much alarmed, and
uses nearly as many expressions of astonishment, at having to go
down a steep hill and ford a brook, as a traveler uses now at
crossing the glacier of the Col de Geant. I am not sure whether
the difficulties which until late years have lain in the way of
peaceful and convenient traveling, ought not to have great weight
assigned to them among the other causes of the temper of the
century; but be that as it may, if you will examine the whole
range of its literature- keeping this point in view-I am well
persuaded that you will be struck most forcibly by the strange
deadness to the higher sources of landscape sublimity which is
mingled with the morbid pastoralism. The love of fresh air and
green grass forced itself upon the animal natures of men; but
that of the sublimer features of scenery had no place in minds
whose chief powers had been repressed by the formalisms of the
age. And although in the second-rate writers continually, and in
the first-rate ones occasionally, you find an affectation of interest
in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever they write from
their heart you will find an utter absence of feeling respecting
anything beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for instance, the
novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Molière,
and the writings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you
will find a single expression of true delight in sublime nature in
any one of them. Perhaps Sterne's 'Sentimental Journey,' in its


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JOHN RUSKIN
12525
total absence of sentiment on any subject but humanity, and its
entire want of notice of anything at Geneva which might not as
well have been seen at Coxwold, is the most striking instance I
could give you; and if you compare with this negation of feeling
on one side, the interludes of Molière, in which shepherds and
shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you will have a very
accurate conception of the general spirit of the age.
It was in such a state of society that the landscape of Claude,
Gaspar Poussin, and Salvator Rosa attained its reputation. It
is the complete expression on canvas of the spirit of the time.
Claude embodies the foolish pastoralism, Salvator the ignorant
terror, and Gaspar the dull and affected erudition.
It was, however, altogether impossible that this state of things
could long continue. The age which had buried itself in form-
alism grew weary at last of the restraint; and the approach of a
new era was marked by the appearance, and the enthusiastic
reception, of writers who took true delight in those wild scenes
of nature which had so long been despised.
I think the first two writers in whom the symptoms of a
change are strongly manifested are Mrs. Radcliffe and Rousseau;
in both of whom the love of natural scenery, though mingled in
the one case with what was merely dramatic, and in the other
with much that was pitifully morbid or vicious, was still itself
genuine and intense, differing altogether in character from any
sentiments previously traceable in literature. And then rapidly
followed a group of writers who expressed, in various ways, the
more powerful or more pure feeling which had now become one
of the strongest instincts of the age. Of these, the principal is
your own Walter Scott. Many writers, indeed, describe nature
more minutely and more profoundly; but none show in higher
intensity the peculiar passion for what is majestic or lovely in
wild nature, to which I am now referring.
now referring. The whole of the
poem of the 'Lady of the Lake' is written with almost a boyish
enthusiasm for rocks, and lakes, and cataracts; the early novels
show the same instinct in equal strength wherever he approaches
Highland scenery: and the feeling is mingled, observe, with a
most touching and affectionate appreciation of the Gothic archi-
tecture, in which alone he found the elements of natural beauty
seized by art; so that to this day his descriptions of Melrose and
Holy Island Cathedral in the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' and
'Marmion,' as well as of the ideal abbeys in the 'Monastery'


## p. 12526 (#586) ##########################################

12526
JOHN RUSKIN
and 'Antiquary,' together with those of Caerlaverock and Loch-
leven Castles in 'Guy Mannering' and 'The Abbot,' remain the
staple possessions and text-books of all travelers,-not so much.
for their beauty or accuracy, as for their exactly expressing that
degree of feeling with which most men in this century can sym-
pathize.
THE THRONE
From the Stones of Venice'
IN
N THE olden days of traveling, 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 traveler 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 tow-
ers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset,— hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival
in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent,-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 more fondly cherished by the traveler than that
which, as I endeavored to describe in the close of the last chap-
ter, 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 shallow-
ness 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


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JOHN RUSKIN
12527
moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and dis-
appearing 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 sun declined behind the belfry tower of the
lonely island church, fitly named "St. George of the Seaweed. "
As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveler
had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored
line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but at what
seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark
cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of
the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended
themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with
the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded
the whole horizon to the north—a wall of jagged blue, here and
there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its
snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind
the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the
crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pur-
suing them to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles
of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along
the waves as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer
and nearer. And at last, when its walls were reached, and the
outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not through tow-
ered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two
rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveler's
sight opened the long ranges of columned palaces, each with its
black boat moored at the portal, each with its image cast down
beneath its feet upon that green pavement which every breeze
broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the
extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colos-
sal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlen-
ghi that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a
mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before
its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry,
-


## p. 12528 (#588) ##########################################

12528
JOHN RUSKIN
"Ah, Stall! " struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside
under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal,
where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing
along the marble by the boat's side; and when at last that boat
darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the
front of the Ducal Palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks
to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation,—it was no mar-
vel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary
charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the
darker truths of its history and its being. Well might it seem
that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of
the enchanter than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters
which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state,
rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in
nature was wild or merciless,- Time and Decay, as well as the
waves and tempests,- had been won to adorn her instead of
to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty
which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-
glass as well as of the sea.
·
And although the last few eventful years, fraught with change
to the face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their
influence on Venice than the five hundred that preceded them;
though the noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen
no more, or seen only by a glance as the engine slackens its rush-
ing on the iron line; and though many of her palaces are for ever
defaced, and many in desecrated ruins,-there is still so much
of magic in her aspect that the hurried traveler, who must leave
her before the wonder of that first aspect has been worn away,
may still be led to forget the humility of her origin, and to shut
his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They at least are little
to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities of the imagi-
nation lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress
the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is igno-
ble and disguise what is discordant in a scene so rich in its
remembrances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for this work
of the imagination there must be no permission during the task
which is before us. The impotent feelings of romance, so singu-
larly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never
save, the remains of those mightier ages to which they are at-
tached like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from
the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood


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JOHN RUSKIN
12529
in their own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they
are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even
of discerning, the objects to which they ought to have been
attached. The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of
yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which
the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner
whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved
sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs" which is the
centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of
Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now passes
with breathless interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero
address as of one of his great ancestors was erected to a sol-
dier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's death;
and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely
altered in the course of the last three centuries, that if Henry
Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from their tombs,
and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the
Grand Canal,- that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite.
subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the water first nar-
rows by the steps of the Church of La Salute,-the mighty
Doges would not know in what spot of the world they stood,
would literally not recognize one stone of the great city for
whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been
brought down with bitterness to the grave. The remains of their
Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the
delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many, a grass-
grown court and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the
slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years,
and must soon prevail over them for ever. It must be our task
to glean and gather them forth, and restore out of them some
faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous a thousandfold than
that which now exists, yet not created in the day-dream of the
prince, nor by the ostentation of the noble, but built by iron
hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity of
nature and the fury of man; so that its wonderfulness cannot be
grasped by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank
inquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene whose
restless tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of
the city, but long denied her dominion.
•
The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet (vary-
ing considerably with the seasons); but this fall, on so flat a
XXI-784


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12530
JOHN RUSKIN
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 main-
land, 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 unlifted 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 standing 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 con-
verge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and som-
bre 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,
when every plot of higher ground bears some fragment of fair
building: but in order to know what it was once, let the traveler
follow in his boat at evening the windings of some unfrequented
channel far into the midst of the melancholy plain; let him re-
move, 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


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JOHN RUSKIN
12531
fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tide-
less pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a ques-
tioning 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 imagi-
nation 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 refine-
ment of the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for
the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been
no tide, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow
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 water access 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 court-yards, 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
streets of the city would have been widened, its network of
canals filled up, and all the peculiar character of the place and
the people destroyed.
The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast
between this faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne,
and the romantic conception of it which we ordinarily form; but
this pain, if he have felt it, ought to be more than counter-
balanced by the value of the instance thus afforded to us at
once of the inscrutableness and the wisdom of the ways of God.
If, two thousand years ago, we had been permitted to watch the


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JOHN RUSKIN
slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted
sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the life-
less, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have
understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out
of the void, and the torpid waters inclosed with their desolate
walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than
of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless,
the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose
hand are all the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in
the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those
fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among their shallows,
there was indeed a preparation, and the only preparation possible,
for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden
clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white
scrolls of the sea surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to
gather and give forth in world-wide pulsation the glory of the
West and of the East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude
and Splendor.
DESCRIPTION OF ST. MARK'S
From the Stones of Venice'
A
YARD or two farther we pass the hostelry of the Black Eagle;
and glancing as we pass through the square door of mar-
ble, deeply molded, in the outer wall, we see the shadows
of its pergola of vines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed
shield carved on its side; and so presently emerge on the bridge
and Campo San Moisè, whence to the entrance into St. Mark's
Place, called the Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the square), the Ve-
netian character is nearly destroyed, first by the frightful façade
of San Moisè, which we will pause at another time to examine,
and then by the modernizing of the shops as they near the piazza,
and the mingling with the lower Venetian populace of lounging
groups of English and Austrians. We will push fast through
them into the shadow of the pillars at the end of the Bocca di
Piazza, and then we forget them all: for between those pillars
there opens a great light, and in the midst of it, as we advance
slowly, the vast tower of St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly
forth from the level field of checkered stones; and on each side
the countless arches prolong themselves into ranged symmetry,


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JOHN RUSKIN
12533
as if the rugged and irregular houses that pressed together above
us in the dark alley had been struck back into sudden obedi-
ence and lovely order, and all their rude casements and broken
walls had been transformed into arches charged with goodly
sculpture and fluted shafts of delicate stone.
And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of ordered
arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great
square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we
may see it far away;-a multitude of pillars and white domes,
clustered into a long low pyramid of colored light; a treasure
heap, it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-
pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with
fair mosaic and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber
and delicate as ivory,- sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm
leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging
and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an
endless network of buds and plumes; and in the midst of it the
solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and lean-
ing to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among
the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them,
-interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back
among the branches of Eden when first its gates were angel-
guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are
set pillars of variegated stones,- jasper and porphyry, and deep-
green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles that
half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their
bluest veins to kiss,". the shadow, as it steals back from them,
revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide.
leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery,
rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and
vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross;
and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of
language and of life,-angels, and the signs of heaven, and the
labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and
above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with
white arches edged with scarlet flowers,-a confusion of delight,
amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in
their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted.
on a blue field covered with stars: until at last, as if in ecstasy,
the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss them-
―


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12534
JOHN RUSKIN
selves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured
spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound
before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral
and amethyst.
Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an
interval! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt
them; for instead of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-
winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark's porches
are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and min-
gle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every
motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood un-
changed for seven hundred years.
And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath
it? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the
gateway of St. Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it,
nor a countenance brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier
and civilian, rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to
the very recesses of the porches, the meanest tradesmen of the
city push their counters; nay, the foundations of its pillars are
themselves the seats, not "of them that sell doves" for sacrifice,
but of the vendors of toys and caricatures. Round the whole
square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line
of cafés, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge
and read empty journals; in its centre the Austrian bands play
during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the
organ notes,-the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen
crowd thickening round them,-a crowd which if it had its
will, would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the
recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest
classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like
lizards; and unregarded children - every heavy glance of their
young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their
throats hoarse with cursing-gamble and fight and snarl and
sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised centesimi upon the
marble ledges of the church porch. And the images of Christ
and his angels look down upon it continually.
That we may not enter the church out of the midst of the
horror of this, let us turn aside under the portico which looks
towards the sea, and passing round within the two massive pil-
lars brought from St. Jean d'Acre, we shall find the gate of the


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JOHN RUSKIN
12535
Baptistery: let us enter there. The heavy door closes behind us
instantly; and the light, and the turbulence of the Piazzetta, are
together shut out by it.
We are in a low vaulted room; vaulted not with arches, but
with small cupolas starred with gold and checkered with gloomy
figures: in the centre is a bronze font charged with rich bas-
reliefs; a small figure of the Baptist standing above it in a single
ray of light, that glances across the narrow room, dying as it
falls, from a window high in the wall-and the first thing that
it strikes, and the only thing that it strikes brightly, is a tomb.
We hardly know if it be a tomb indeed: for it is like a narrow
couch set beside the window, low-roofed and curtained; so that it
might seem, but that it has some height above the pavement, to
have been drawn towards the window, that the sleeper might be
wakened early,-only there are two angels who have drawn the
curtain back, and are looking down upon him. Let us look also,
and thank that gentle light that rests upon his forehead for ever,
and dies away upon his breast.
The face is of a man in middle life, but there are two deep
furrows right across the forehead, dividing it like the foundations
of a tower; the height of it above is bound by the fillet of
the ducal cap. The rest of the features are singularly small and
delicate, the lips sharp,-perhaps the sharpness of death being
added to that of the natural lines; but there is a sweet smile
upon them, and a deep serenity upon the whole countenance.
The roof of the canopy above has been blue, filled with stars;
beneath, in the centre of the tomb on which the figure rests, is
a seated figure of the Virgin, and the border of it all around
is of flowers and soft leaves, growing rich and deep as if in a
field in summer.
It is the Doge Andrea Dandolo; a man early great among the
great of Venice, and early lost. She chose him for her king
in his thirty-sixth year; he died ten years later, leaving behind
him that history to which we owe half of what we know of her
former fortunes.
Look round at the room in which he lies. The floor of it is
of rich mosaic, encompassed by a low seat of red marble; and its
walls are of alabaster, but worn and shattered and darkly stained
with age, almost a ruin,-in places the slabs of marble have
fallen away altogether, and the rugged brickwork is seen through
the rents: but all beautiful,-the ravaging fissures fretting their


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JOHN RUSKIN
way among the islands and channeled zones of the alabaster, and
the time stains on its translucent masses darkened into fields of
rich golden brown, like the color of seaweed when the sun strikes
on it through deep sea. The light fades away into the recess of
the chamber towards the altar, and the eye can hardly trace the
1 lines of the bas-relief behind it of the baptism of Christ: but on
the vaulting of the roof the figures are distinct, and there are
seen upon it two great circles,-one surrounded by the "princi-
palities and powers in heavenly places," of which Milton has
expressed the ancient division in the single massy line-
"Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers," —
and around the other the Apostles; Christ the centre of both:
and upon the walls, again and again repeated, the gaunt figure
of the Baptist, in every circumstance of his life and death; and
the streams of the Jordan running down between their cloven
rocks; the axe laid to the root of a fruitless tree that springs
upon their shore. "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit
shall be hewn down, and cast into the fire.
" Yes, verily: to
be baptized with fire or to be cast therein,—it is the choice set
before all men. The march notes still murmur through the grated
window, and mingle with the sounding in our ears of the sen-
tence of judgment which the old Greek has written on that
Baptistery wall. Venice has made her choice.
He who lies under that stony canopy would have taught her
another choice, in his day, if she would have listened to him;
but he and his counsels have long been forgotten by her, and the
dust lies upon his lips.
Through the heavy door whose bronze network closes the
place of his rest, let us enter the church itself. It is lost in
still deeper twilight, to which the eye must be accustomed for
some moments before the form of the building can be traced;
and then there opens before us a vast cave, hewn out into the
form of a cross, and divided into shadowy aisles by many pil-
lars. Round the domes of its roof the light enters only through
narrow apertures like large stars; and here and there a ray
or two from some far-away casement wanders into the darkness,
and casts a narrow phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble
that heave and fall in a thousand colors along the floor. What
else there is of light is from torches, or silver lamps, burning


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JOHN RUSKIN
12537
ceaselessly in the recesses of the chapels: the roof sheeted with
gold, and the polished walls covered with alabaster, give back at
every curve and angle some feeble gleaming to the flames; and
the glories round the heads of the sculptured saints flash out
upon us as we pass them, and sink again into the gloom. Under
foot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery,
one picture passing into another, as in a dream; forms beautiful
and terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and raven-
ing beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them
drink from running fountains and feed from vases of crystal: the
passions and the pleasures of human life symbolized together, and
the mystery of its redemption; for the mazes of interwoven lines
and changeful pictures lead always at last to the Cross, lifted and
carved in every place and upon every stone; sometimes with the
serpent of eternity wrapt round it, sometimes with doves beneath
its arms and sweet herbage growing forth from its feet; but
conspicuous most of all on the great rood that crosses the church
before the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the shadow of
the apse.
And although in the recesses of the isles and chapels,
when the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see contin-
ually a figure traced in faint lines upon their marble,—a woman
standing with her eyes raised to heaven, and the inscription.
above her "Mother of God," she is not here the presiding
deity. It is the Cross that is first seen, and always, burning in
the centre of the temple; and every dome and hollow of its roof
has the figure of Christ in the utmost height of it, raised in
power, or returning in judgment.
Nor is this interior without effect on the minds of the people.
At every hour of the day there are groups collected before the
various shrines, and solitary worshipers scattered through the
darker places of the church,-evidently in prayer both deep
and reverent, and for the most part profoundly sorrowful. The
devotees at the greater number of the renowned shrines of Ro-
manism may be seen murmuring their appointed prayers with
wandering eyes and unengaged gestures: but the step of the
stranger does not disturb those who kneel on the pavement of
St. Mark's; and hardly a moment passes, from early morning to
sunset, in which we may not see some half-veiled figure enter
beneath the Arabian porch, cast itself into long abasement on
the floor of the temple, and then, rising slowly with more con-
firmed step, and with a passionate kiss and clasp of the arms
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12538
JOHN RUSKIN
given to the feet of the crucifix, by which the lamps burn always
in the northern aisle, leave the church as if comforted.
But we must not hastily conclude from this that the nobler
characters of the building have at present any influence in fos-
tering a devotional spirit. There is distress enough in Venice to
bring many to their knees, without excitement from external
imagery; and whatever there may be in the temper of the wor-
ship offered in St. Mark's more than can be accounted for by
reference to the unhappy circumstances of the city, is assuredly
not owing either to the beauty of its architecture or to the
impressiveness of the Scripture histories embodied in its mosaics.
That it has a peculiar effect, however slight, on the popular
mind, may perhaps be safely conjectured from the number of
worshipers which it attracts, while the churches of St. Paul and
the Frari, larger in size and more central in position, are left
comparatively empty. But this effect is altogether to be ascribed
to its richer assemblage of those sources of influence which
address themselves to the commonest instincts of the human
mind, and which, in all ages and countries, have been more or
less employed in the support of superstition. Darkness and mys-
tery; confused recesses of building; artificial light employed in
small quantity, but maintained with a constancy which seems to
give it a kind of sacredness; preciousness of material easily
comprehended by the vulgar eye; close air loaded with a sweet
and peculiar odor associated only with religious services, solemn
music, and tangible idols or images having popular legends at-
tached to them,- these, the stage properties of superstition, which
have been from the beginning of the world, and must be to the
end of it, employed by all nations, whether openly savage or
nominally civilized, to produce a false awe in minds incapable of
apprehending the true nature of the Deity, are assembled in St.
Mark's to a degree, as far as I know, unexampled in any other
European church. The arts of the Magus and the Brahmin
are exhausted in the animation of a paralyzed Christianity; and
the popular sentiment which these arts excite is to be regarded
by us with no more respect than we should have considered our-
selves justified in rendering to the devotion of the worshipers at
Eleusis, Ellora, or Edfou.
Indeed, these inferior means of exciting religious emotion
were employed in the ancient Church as they are at this day;
but not employed alone. Torchlight there was, as there is now;


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JOHN RUSKIN
12539
but the torchlight illumined Scripture histories on the walls,
which every eye traced and every heart comprehended, but which,
during my whole residence in Venice, I never saw one Venetian
regard for an instant. I never heard from any one the most
languid expression of interest in any feature of the church, or
perceived the slightest evidence of their understanding the mean-
ing of its architecture; and while therefore the English cathedral,
though no longer dedicated to the kind of services for which it
was intended by its builders, and much at variance in many of
its characters with the temper of the people by whom it is now
surrounded, retains yet so much of its religious influence that no
prominent feature of its architecture can be said to exist alto-
gether in vain, we have in St. Mark's a building apparently still
employed in the ceremonies for which it was designed, and yet
of which the impressive attributes have altogether ceased to be
comprehended by its votaries. The beauty which it possesses is
unfelt, the language it uses is forgotten; and in the midst of the
city to whose service it has so long been consecrated, and still
filled by crowds of the descendants of those to whom it owes its
magnificence, it stands in reality more desolate than the ruins.
through which the sheep-walk passes unbroken in our English
valleys; and the writing on its marble walls is less regarded and
less powerful for the teaching of men than the letters which the
shepherd follows with his finger, where the moss is lightest on
the tombs in the desecrated cloister.
CALAIS SPIRE
From Modern Painters'
THE
HE essence of picturesque character has been already defined
to be a sublimity not inherent in the nature of the thing,
but caused by something external to it; as the ruggedness
of a cottage roof possesses something of a mountain aspect, not
belonging to the cottage as such. And this sublimity may be
either in mere external ruggedness and other visible character,
or it may lie deeper, in an expression of sorrow and old age,
attributes which are both sublime; not a dominant expression,
but one mingled with such familiar and common characters as
prevent the object from becoming perfectly pathetic in its sor-
row, or perfectly venerable in its age.


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JOHN RUSKIN
1
For instance, I cannot find words to express the intense
pleasure I have always in first finding myself, after some pro-
longed stay in England, at the foot of the old tower of Calais
church. The large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; the
record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of weak-
ness or decay; its stern wasteness and gloom, eaten away by the
Channel winds and overgrown with the bitter sea grasses; its
slates and tiles all shaken and rent, and yet not falling; its
desert of brickwork full of bolts and holes and ugly fissures,
and yet strong, like a bare brown rock; its carelessness of what
any one thinks or feels about it,-putting forth no claim, having
no beauty nor desirableness, pride nor grace, yet neither asking
for pity; not, as ruins are, useless and piteous, feebly or fondly
garrulous of better days, but useful still, going through its own
daily work, as some old fisherman beaten gray by storm, yet
drawing his daily nets: so it stands, with no complaint about its
past youth, in blanched and meagre massiveness and serviceable-
ness, gathering human souls together underneath it; the sound
of its bells for prayer still rolling through its rents; and the
gray peak of it seen far across the sea, principal of the three
that rise above the waste of surfy sand and hillocked shore,-
the lighthouse for life, and the belfry for labor, and this for
patience and praise.
I cannot tell the half of the strange pleasures and thoughts
that come about me at the sight of that old tower: for in some
sort, it is the epitome of all that makes the Continent of Europe
interesting, as opposed to new countries; and above all, it com-
pletely expresses that agedness in the midst of active life which
binds the old and the new into harmony. We in England have
our new street, our new inn, our green shaven lawn, and our
piece of ruin emergent from it,-a mere specimen of the Middle
Ages put on a bit of velvet carpet to be shown, which but for
its size might as well be on the museum shelf at once, under
cover. But on the Continent the links are unbroken between
the past and present, and in such use as they can serve for, the
gray-headed wrecks are suffered to stay with men; while in un-
broken line the generations of spared buildings are seen succeed-
ing each in its place. And thus in its largeness, in its permitted
evidence of slow decline, in its poverty, in its absence of all pre-
tense, of all show and care for outside aspect, that Calais tower
has an infinite of symbolism in it, all the more striking because
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JOHN RUSKIN
12541
usually seen in contrast with English scenes expressive of feel-
ings the exact reverse of these.
And I am sorry to say that the opposition is most distinct
in that noble carelessness as to what people think of it. Once,
on coming from the Continent, almost the first inscription I saw
in my native English was this:
―
"TO LET, A GENTEEL HOUSE UP THIS ROAD"
And it struck me forcibly, for I had not come across the idea of
gentility, among the upper limestones of the Alps, for seven
onths; nor do I think that the Continental nations in general
have the idea. They would have advertised a "pretty" house,
or a "large" one, or a "convenient " one; but they could not,
by any use of the terms afforded by their several languages,
have got at the English "genteel. " Consider a little all the
meanness that there is in that epithet, and then see, when next
you cross the Channel, how scornful of it that Calais spire will
look.
Of which spire the largeness and age are also opposed exactly
to the chief appearances of modern England, as one feels them
on first returning to it: that marvelous smallness both of houses
and scenery, so that a plowman in the valley has his head on
a level with the tops of all the hills in the neighborhood; and a
house is organized into complete establishment — parlor, kitchen,
and all, with a knocker to its door, and a garret window to its
roof, and a bow to its second story-on a scale of twelve feet
wide by fifteen high, so that three such at least would go into
the granary of any ordinary Swiss cottage; and also our serenity
of perfection, our peace of conceit, everything being done that
vulgar minds can conceive as wanting to be done; the spirit of
well-principled housemaids everywhere exerting itself for perpet-
ual propriety and renovation, so that nothing is old, but only
" old-fashioned," and contemporary, as it were, in date and im-
pressiveness, only with last year's bonnets. Abroad, a building of
the eighth or tenth century stands ruinous in the open street;
the children play round it, the peasants heap their corn in it, the
buildings of yesterday nestle about it, and fit their new stones
into its rents, and tremble in sympathy as it trembles.
No one
wonders at it, or thinks of it as separate, and of another time;
we feel the ancient world to be a real thing, and one with the
new antiquity is no dream; it is rather the children playing
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12542
JOHN RUSKIN
about the old stones that are the dream. But all is continuous,
and the words "from generation to generation" understandable
there. Whereas here we have a living present, consisting merely
of what is "fashionable" and "old-fashioned"; and a past of
which there are no vestiges; a past which peasant or citizen can
no more conceive-all equally far away-Queen Elizabeth as
old as Queen Boadicea, and both incredible. At Verona we look
out of Can Grande's window to his tomb; and if he does not
stand beside us, we feel only that he is in the grave instead of
the chamber,—not that he is old, but that he might have been
beside us last night. But in England the dead are dead to pur-
pose.
One cannot believe they ever were alive, or anything else
than what they are now,-names in schoolbooks.
Then that spirit of trimness. The smooth paving-stones; the
scraped, hard, even, rutless roads; the neat gates and plates,
and essence of border and order, and spikiness and spruceness.
Abroad, a country-house has some confession of human weakness
and human fates about it. There are the old grand gates still,
which the mob pressed sore against at the Revolution, and the
strained hinges have never gone so well since; and the broken
greyhound on the pillar-still broken-better so: but the long
avenue is gracefully pale with fresh green, and the court-yard
bright with orange-trees; the garden is a little run to waste,-
since Mademoiselle was married nobody cares much about it;
and one range of apartments is shut up,-nobody goes into them
since Madame died. But with us, let who will be married or
die, we neglect nothing. All is polished and precise again next
morning; and whether people are happy or miserable, poor or
prosperous, still we sweep the stairs of a Saturday.
Now, I have insisted long on this English character, because
I want the reader to understand thoroughly the opposite ele-
ment of the noble picturesque; its expression, namely, of suffer-
ing, of poverty, or decay, nobly endured by unpretending strength
of heart. Nor only unpretending, but unconscious. If there be
visible pensiveness in the building, as in a ruined abbey, it be-
comes, or claims to become, beautiful; but the picturesqueness is
in the unconscious suffering,-the look that an old laborer has,
not knowing that there is anything pathetic in his gray hair and
withered arms and sunburnt breast: and thus there are the two
extremes, the consciousness of pathos in the confessed ruin,
which may or may not be beautiful, according to the kind of it;
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JOHN RUSKIN
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and the entire denial of all human calamity and care, in the
swept proprieties and neatness of English modernism: and be-
tween these there is the unconscious confession of the facts of
distress and decay, in by-words; the world's hard work being gone
through all the while, and no pity asked for nor contempt feared.
And this is the expression of that Calais spire, and of all pict-
uresque things, in so far as they have mental or human expres-
sion at all.
THE FRIBOURG DISTRICT, SWITZERLAND
From Modern Painters >
I
Do not know that there is a district in the world more calcu-
lated to illustrate this power of the expectant imagination,
than that which surrounds the city of Fribourg in Switzer-
land, extending from it towards Berne. It is of gray sandstone,
considerably elevated, but presenting no object of striking inter-
est to the passing traveler; so that, as it is generally seen in the
course of a hasty journey from the Bernese Alps to those of
Savoy, it is rarely regarded with any other sensation than that
of weariness, all the more painful because accompanied with re-
action from the high excitement caused by the splendor of the
Bernese Oberland. The traveler, footsore, feverish, and satiated
with glacier and precipice, lies back in the corner of the diligence,
perceiving little more than that the road is winding and hilly,
and the country through which it passes cultivated and tame.
Let him, however, only do this tame country the justice of stay-
ing in it a few days until his mind has recovered its tone, and
take one or two long walks through its fields, and he will have
other thoughts of it. It is, as I said, an undulating district of
gray sandstone, never attaining any considerable height, but hav-
ing enough of the mountain spirit to throw itself into continual
succession of bold slope and dale; elevated also just far enough
above the sea to render the pine a frequent forest tree along its
irregular ridges. Through this elevated tract the river cuts its
way in a ravine some five or six hundred feet in depth, which
winds for leagues between the gentle hills, unthought of, until
its edge is approached: and then suddenly, through the boughs
of the firs, the eye perceives, beneath, the green and gliding
stream, and the broad walls of sandstone cliff that form its


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12544
JOHN RUSKIN
banks; hollowed out where the river leans against them, at its
turns, into perilous overhanging; and on the other shore, at the
same spots, leaving little breadths of meadow between them and
the water, half overgrown with thicket, deserted in their sweet-
ness, inaccessible from above, and rarely visited by any curious.
wanderers along the hardly traceable foot-path which struggles
for existence beneath the rocks. And there the river ripples
and eddies and murmurs, in an utter solitude. It is passing
through the midst of a thickly peopled country; but never was a
stream so lonely. The feeblest and most far-away torrent among
the high hills has its companions: the goats browse beside it;
and the traveler drinks from it, and passes over it with his staff;
and the peasant traces a new channel for it down to his mill-
wheel. But this stream has no companions: it flows on in an
infinite seclusion, not secret nor threatening, but a quietness of
sweet daylight and open air,- a broad space of tender and deep
desolateness, drooped into repose out of the midst of human
labor and life; the waves plashing lowly, with none to hear
them; and the wild birds building in the boughs, with none to
fray them away; and the soft, fragrant herbs rising and breath-
ing and fading, with no hand to gather them; - and yet all
bright and bare to the clouds above, and to the fresh fall of the
passing sunshine and pure rain.
·
But above the brows of those scarped cliffs, all is in an in-
stant changed. A few steps only beyond the firs that stretch
their branches, angular and wild and white like forks of light-
ning, into the air of the ravine, and we are in an arable country
of the most perfect richness: the swathes of its corn glowing and
burning from field to field; its pretty hamlets all vivid with fruit-
ful orchards and flowery gardens, and goodly with steep-roofed
storehouse and barn; its well-kept, hard, park-like roads rising
and falling from hillside to hillside, or disappearing among brown
banks of moss and thickets of the wild raspberry and rose, or
gleaming through lines of tall trees, half glade, half avenue,
where the gate opens—or the gateless path turns trustedly aside,
unhindered, into the garden of some statelier house, surrounded
in rural pride with its golden hives, and carved granaries, and
irregular domain of latticed and espaliered cottages, gladdening
to look upon in their delicate homeliness-delicate, yet in some
sort rude: not like our English homes- trim, laborious, formal,
irreproachable in comfort; but with a peculiar carelessness and


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largeness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed love-
liness of their country. For there is an untamed strength even
in all that soft and habitable land. It is indeed gilded with
corn and fragrant with deep grass; but it is not subdued to the
plow or to the scythe. It gives at its own free will, it seems
to have nothing wrested from it nor conquered in it. It is not
redeemed from desertness, but unrestrained in fruitfulness, a
generous land, bright with capricious plenty, and laughing from
vale to vale in fitful fullness, kind and wild; nor this without
some sterner element mingled in the heart of it. For along all
its ridge stand the dark masses of innumerable pines, taking
no part in its gladness,-asserting themselves for ever as fixed
shadows, not to be pierced or banished even in the intensest
sunlight; fallen flakes and fragments of the night, stayed in their
solemn squares in the midst of all the rosy bendings of the orchard
boughs and yellow effulgence of the harvest, and tracing them-
selves in black network and motionless fringes against the
blanched blue of the horizon in its saintly clearness.
And yet
they do not sadden the landscape, but seem to have been set
there chiefly to show how bright everything else is round them;
and all the clouds look of purer silver, and all the air seems
filled with a whiter and more living sunshine, where they are
pierced by the sable points of the pines; and all the pastures
look of more glowing green, where they run up between the
purple trunks: and the sweet field footpaths skirt the edges of
the forest for the sake of its shade, sloping up and down about
the slippery roots, and losing themselves every now and then
hopelessly among the violets, and ground ivy, and brown shed-
dings of the fibrous leaves; and at last plunging into some
open aisle where the light through the distant stems shows that
there is a chance of coming out again on the other side; and
coming out indeed in a little while, from the scented darkness.
into the dazzling air and marvelous landscape, that stretches still
farther and farther in new willfulness of grove and garden, until
at last the craggy mountains of the Simmenthal rise out of it,
sharp into the rolling of the southern clouds.
I believe, for general development of human intelligence and
sensibility, country of this kind is about the most perfect that
exists. A richer landscape, as that of Italy, enervates or causes
wantonness; a poorer contracts the conceptions, and hardens the
temperament of both mind and body; and one more curiously or
XXI-785
――


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12546
JOHN. RUSKIN
prominently beautiful deadens the sense of beauty. Even what
is here of attractiveness- far exceeding, as it does, that of most
of the thickly peopled districts of the temperate zone seems to
act harmfully on the poetical character of the Swiss; but take its
inhabitants all in all,-as with deep love and stern penetration
they are painted in the works of their principal writer, Gotthelf,
- and I believe we shall not easily find a peasantry which would
completely sustain comparison with them.
--
THE MOUNTAIN GLOOM
From Modern Painters >
-
I
Do not know any district possessing more pure or uninter-
rupted fullness of mountain character (and that of the high-
est order), or which appears to have been less disturbed
by foreign agencies, than that which borders the course of the
Trient between Valorsine and Martigny. The paths which lead
to it out of the valley of the Rhone, rising at first in steep
circles among the walnut-trees, like winding stairs among the
pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over the shoulders of the hills
into a valley almost unknown, but thickly inhabited by an indus-
trious and patient population. Along the ridges of the rocks,
smoothed by old glaciers into long, dark, billowy swellings, like
the backs of plunging dolphins, the peasant watches the slow
coloring of the tufts of moss and roots of herb, which little by
little gather a feeble soil over the iron substance; then, support-
ing the narrow strip of clinging ground with a few stones, he
subdues it to the spade; and in a year or two a little crest
of corn is seen waving upon the rocky casque. The irregular
meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among these har-
vested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets that seem always
to have chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of
the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and that
as the wind takes them, with all the grace but with none of the
formalism of fountains; dividing into fanciful change of dash
and spring, yet with the seal of their granite channels upon
them, as the lightest play of human speech may bear the seal of
past toil, and closing back out of their spray to lave the rigid
angles, and brighten with silver fringes and glassy films each


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12547
lower and lower step of stable stone; until at last, gathered all
together again, except perhaps some chance drops caught on
the apple blossom, where it has budded a little nearer the cascade
than it did last spring,-they find their way down to the turf,
and lose themselves in that silently; with quiet depth of clear
water furrowing among the grass blades, and looking only like.
their shadow, but presently emerging again in little startled
gushes and laughing hurries, as if they had remembered sud-
denly that the day was too short for them to get down the hill.
Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing streamlet, all
slope together in the sunshine towards the brows of the ravines,
where the pines take up their own dominion of saddened shade;
and with everlasting roar in the twilight, the stronger torrents
thunder down pale from the glaciers, filling all their chasms
with enchanted cold, beating themselves to pieces against the
great rocks that they have themselves cast down, and forcing
fierce way beneath their ghastly poise.
The mountain paths stoop to these glens in forky zigzags,
leading to some gray and narrow arch, all fringed under its
shuddering curve with the ferns that fear the light; a cross of
rough-hewn pine, iron-bound to its parapet, standing dark against
the lurid fury of the foam. Far up the glen, as we pause beside
the cross, the sky is seen through the openings in the pines,
thin with excess of light; and, in its clear, consuming flame of
white space, the summits of the rocky mountains are gathered
into solemn crown and circlets, all flushed in that strange, faint
silence of possession by the sunshine which has in it so deep a
melancholy; full of power, yet as frail as shadows; lifeless, like
the walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in tender fall of crim-
son folds, like the veil of some sea spirit that lives and dies as
the foam flashes; fixed on a perpetual throne, stern against all
strength, lifted above all sorrow, and yet effaced and melted
utterly into the air by that last sunbeam that has crossed to
them from between the two golden clouds.
High above all sorrow: yes; but not unwitnessing to it. The
traveler on his happy journey, as his foot springs from the deep
turf and strikes the pebbles gayly over the edge of the mountain
road, sees with a glance of delight the clusters of nut-brown.
cottages that nestle among those sloping orchards, and glow be-
neath the boughs of the pines. Here, it may well seem to him,
if there be sometimes hardship, there must be at least innocence
-


## p. 12548 (#608) ##########################################

12548
JOHN RUSKIN
and peace, and fellowship of the human soul with nature. It
is not so. The wild goats that leap along those rocks have as
much passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men
that toil among them. Perhaps more. Enter the street of one
of those villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy
foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul.
Here it is torpor: not absolute suffering, not starvation or dis-
ease, but darkness of calm enduring; - the spring known only
as the time of the scythe, and the autumn as the time of the
sickle; and the sun only as a warmth, the wind as a chill, and
the mountains as a danger. They do not understand so much as
the name of beauty, or of knowledge. They understand dimly
that of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality, faith, these things
they know. To glean their meadows side by side, so happier;
to bear the burden up the breathless mountain flank, unmur-
muringly; to bid the stranger drink from their vessel of milk;
to see at the foot of their low death-beds a pale figure upon a
cross, dying also, patiently; in this they are different from the
cattle and from the stones, but in all this unrewarded as far
as concerns the present life. For them, there is neither hope
nor passion of spirit; for them neither advance nor exultation.
Black bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious day, weary arm at
sunset; and life ebbs away. No books, no thoughts, no attain-
ments; no rest except only sometimes a little sitting in the
sun under the church wall, as the bell tolls thin and far in the
mountain air; a pattering of a few prayers, not understood, by
the altar rails of the dimly gilded chapel, and so back to the
sombre home, with the cloud upon them still unbroken - that
cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the wild torrents and ruin-
ous stones, and unlightened even in their religion except by the
vague promise of some better thing unknown, mingled with
threatening, and obscured by an unspeakable horror-a smoke
as it were of martyrdom, coiling up with the incense, and amidst
the images of tortured bodies and lamenting spirits in hurtling
flames, the very cross, for them, dashed more deeply than for
others with gouts of blood.
Do not let this be thought a darkened picture of the life of
these mountaineers. It is literal fact. No contrast can be more
painful than that between the dwelling of any well-conducted
English cottager and that of the equally honest Savoyard. The
one, set in the midst of its dull flat fields and uninteresting
-
-


## p. 12549 (#609) ##########################################

JOHN RUSKIN
12549
hedge-rows, shows in itself the love of brightness and beauty; its
daisy-studded garden beds, its smoothly swept brick path to the
threshold, its freshly sanded floor and orderly shelves of house-
hold furniture, all testify to energy of heart, and happiness in the
simple course and simple possessions of daily life. The other
cottage, in the midst of an inconceivable, inexpressible beauty,
set on some sloping bank of golden sward, with clear fountains.
flowing beside it, and wild flowers and noble trees and goodly
rocks gathered round into a perfection as of Paradise, is itself a
dark and plague-like stain in the midst of the gentle landscape.
Within a certain distance of its threshold the ground is foul and
cattle-trampled; its timbers are black with smoke, its garden
choked with weeds and nameless refuse, its chambers empty and
joyless, the light and wind gleaming and filtering through the
crannies of their stones. All testifies that to its inhabitant the
world is labor and vanity; that for him neither flowers bloom,
nor birds sing, nor fountains glisten; and that his soul hardly
differs from the gray cloud that coils and dies upon his hills,
except in having no fold of it touched by the sunbeams.
DESCRIPTION OF NATURE
"T
From Modern Painters'
NO DRESS it and to keep it. "
That, then, was to be our work. Alas! what work have
we set ourselves upon instead! How have we ravaged the
garden instead of kept it,-feeding our war-horses with its flow-
ers, and splintering its trees into spear shafts!
"And at the East a flaming sword. "
Is its flame quenchless? and are those gates that keep the way
indeed passable no more? or is it not rather that we no more
desire to enter? For what can we conceive of that first Eden
which we might not yet win back, if we chose? It was a place
full of flowers, we say. Well: the flowers are always striving to
grow wherever we suffer them; and the fairer, the closer. There
may indeed have been a Fall of Flowers, as a Fall of Man: but
assuredly creatures such as we are can now fancy nothing lovelier
than roses and lilies; which would grow for us side by side, leaf
overlapping leaf, till the earth was white and red with them, if


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12550
JOHN RUSKIN
we cared to have it so. And Paradise was full of pleasant shades
and fruitful avenues. Well: what hinders us from covering as
much of the world as we like with pleasant shade and pure blos-
som, and goodly fruit? Who forbids its valleys to be covered
over with corn, till they laugh and sing? Who prevents its
dark forests, ghostly and uninhabitable, from being changed into
infinite orchards, wreathing the hills with frail-floretted snow,
far away to the half-lighted horizon of April, and flushing the
face of all the autumnal earth with glow of clustered food? But
Paradise was a place of peace, we say, and all the animals were
gentle servants to us. Well: the world would yet be a place of
peace if we were all peacemakers, and gentle service should we
have of its creatures if we gave them gentle mastery. But so
long as we make sport of slaying bird and beast, so long as we
choose to contend rather with our fellows than with our faults,
and make battle-field of our meadows instead of pasture,—so
long, truly, the Flaming Sword will still turn every way, and the
gates of Eden remain barred close enough, till we have sheathed
the sharper flame of our own passions, and broken down the
closer gates of our own hearts.
I have been led to see and feel this more and more, as I
considered the service which the flowers and trees, which man
was at first appointed to keep, were intended to render to him
in return for his care; and the services they still render to him,
as far as he allows their influence, or fulfills his own task towards
them. For what infinite wonderfulness there is in this vegeta-
tion, considered, as indeed it is, as the means by which the earth
becomes the companion of man- his friend and his teacher! In
the conditions which we have traced in its rocks, there could
only be seen preparation for his existence; - the characters which
enable him to live on it safely, and to work with it easily-in
all these it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation is to
it as an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The
earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except
of slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human be-
ings look upon and deal with, it ministers to them through a veil
of strange intermediate being; which breathes, but has no voice;
moves, but cannot leave its appointed place; passes through life
without consciousness, to death without bitterness; wears the
beauty of youth, without its passion; and declines to the weak-
ness of age, without its regret.


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JOHN RUSKIN
12551
And in this mystery of intermediate being, entirely subordi-
nate to us, with which we can deal as we choose, having just
the greater power as we have the less responsibility for our
treatment of the unsuffering creature, most of the pleasures which
we need from the external world are gathered, and most of the
lessons we need are written, all kinds of precious grace and
teaching being united in this link between the Earth and Man:
wonderful in universal adaptation to his need, desire, and disci-
pline; God's daily preparation of the earth for him, with beauti-
ful means of life. First a carpet to make it soft for him; then,
a colored fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of
foliage to shade him from sun heat, and shade also the fallen
rain, that it may not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay
to nourish the springs among the moss. Stout wood to bear this
leafage; easily to be cut, yet tough and light, to make houses for
him, or instruments (lance shaft, or plow handle, according to his
temper): useless it had been, if harder; useless, if less fibrous;
useless, if less elastic. Winter comes, and the shade of leafage
falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the strong boughs
remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds which
are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are
made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal
to the fancy of man or provision for his service: cold juice or
glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin,
medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm: and all these
presented in forms of endless change. Fragility or force, softness
and strength, in all degrees and aspects; unerring uprightness as
of temple pillars, or undivided wandering of feeble tendrils on
the ground; mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to the
storms of ages, or wavings to and from with faintest pulse of
summer streamlet. Roots cleaving the strength of rock, or bind-
ing the transience of the sand; crests basking in sunshine of the
desert, or hiding by dripping spring and lightless cave; foliage
far tossing in entangled fields beneath every wave of ocean-
clothing with variegated, everlasting films the peaks of the track-
less mountains, or ministering at cottage doors to every gentlest
passion and simplest joy of humanity.
Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful,
and good for food and for building and for instruments of our
hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and
--


## p. 12552 (#612) ##########################################

12552
JOHN RUSKIN
admiration from us, become, in proportion to their obtaining it,
a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and
way of life: so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves
the trees enough; and every one is assuredly wrong in both who
does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way.
is clearly possible to do without them, for the great companion-
ship of the sea and sky are all that sailors need; and many a
noble heart has been taught the best it had to learn between
dark stone walls. Still, if human life be cast among trees at all,
the love borne to them is a sure test of its purity. And it is a
sorrowful proof of the mistaken ways of the world that
"country," in the simple sense of a place of fields and trees, has
hitherto been the source of reproach to its inhabitants; and that
the words "countryman," "rustic," "clown," "paysan," "villager,"
still signify a rude and untaught person, as opposed to the words
townsman" and "citizen. " We accept this usage of words, or
the evil which it signifies, somewhat too quietly; as if it were
quite necessary and natural that country people should be rude,
and townspeople gentle. Whereas I believe that the result of
each mode of life may, in some stages of the world's progress,
be the exact reverse; and that another use of words may be
forced upon us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may find
ourselves saying: "Such-and-such a person is very gentle and
kind, he is quite rustic; and such-and-such another person is
very rude and ill-taught, he is quite urbane. "
«
At all events, cities have hitherto gained the better part of
their good report through our evil ways of going on in the world
generally;-chiefly and eminently through our bad habit of fight-
ing with each other. No field, in the middle ages, being safe
from devastation, and every country lane yielding easier passage
to the marauders, peacefully minded men necessarily congregated
in cities, and walled themselves in, making as few cross-country
roads as possible; while the men who sowed and reaped the
harvests of Europe were only the servants or slaves of the
barons. The disdain of all agricultural pursuits by the nobility,
and of all plain facts by the monks, kept educated Europe in
a state of mind over which natural phenomena could have no
power; body and intellect being lost in the practice of war
without purpose, and the meditation of words without meaning.
Men learned the dexterity with sword and syllogism, which they


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JOHN RUSKIN
12553
mistook for education, within cloister and tilt-yard; and looked
on all the broad space of the world of God mainly as a place
for exercise of horses, or for growth of food.
There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the perfectness
of the Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that
picture of Paul Uccello's of the battle of Sant' Egidio, in which
the armies meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild
roses; the tender red flowers tossing above the helmets and glow-
ing between the lowered lances. For in like manner the whole
of Nature only shone hitherto for man between the tossing of
helmet crests: and sometimes I cannot but think of the trees of
the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in that imperfect life
of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in the warm
springtime, in vain for men; and all along the dells of Eng-
land her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw
drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; and by the
sweet French rivers their long ranks of poplar waved in the
twilight, only to show the flames of burning cities, on the hori
zon, through the tracery of their stems; amidst the fair defiles
of the Apennines, the twisted olive trunks hid the ambushes of
treachery; and on their valley meadows, day by day, the lilies
which were white at the dawn were washed with crimson at sun-
set.
Of the many marked adaptations of nature to the mind of
man, it seems one of the most singular, that trees intended
especially for the adornment of the wildest mountains should be
in broad outline the most formal of trees. The vine, which is
to be the companion of man, is waywardly docile in its growth,
falling into festoons beside his cornfields, or roofing his garden.
walks, or casting its shadow all summer upon his door. Asso-
ciated always with the trimness of cultivation, it introduces all
possible elements of sweet wildness. The pine, placed nearly
always among scenes disordered and desolate, brings into them
all possible elements of order and precision. Lowland trees may
lean to this side and that, though it is but a meadow breeze that
bends them, or a bank of cowslips from which their trunks lean
aslope. But let storm and avalanche do their worst, and let the
pine find only a ledge of vertical precipice to cling to, it will
nevertheless grow straight. Thrust a rod from its last shoot
down the stem; it shall point to the centre of the earth as
long as the tree lives.


## p. 12554 (#614) ##########################################

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JOHN RUSKIN
Also it may be well for lowland branches to reach hither and
thither for what they need, and to take all kinds of irregular
shape and extension. But the pine is trained to need nothing
and to endure everything. It is resolvedly whole, self-contained,
desiring nothing but rightness, content with restricted comple-
tion. Tall or short, it will be straight. Small or large, it will
be round. It may be permitted also to these soft lowland trees
that they should make themselves gay with show of blossom, and
glad with pretty charities of fruitfulness. We builders with the
sword have harder work to do for man, and must do it in close-
set troops. To stay the sliding of the mountain snows, which
would bury him; to hold in divided drops at our sword points
the rain, which would sweep away him and his treasure fields;
to nurse in shade among our brown fallen leaves the tricklings
that feed the brooks in drought; to give massive shield against
the winter wind, which shrieks through the bare branches of the
plain; such service must we do him steadfastly while we live.
Our bodies also are at his service: softer than the bodies of
other trees, though our toil is harder than theirs. Let him take
them as pleases him, for his houses and ships. So also it may
be well for these timid lowland trees to tremble with all their
leaves, or turn their paleness to the sky, if but a rush of rain
passes by them; or to let fall their leaves at last, sick and sere.
But we pines must live carelessly amidst the wrath of clouds.
We only wave our branches to and fro when the storm pleads
with us, as men toss their arms in a dream.
-
And finally, these weak lowland trees may struggle fondly for
the last remnants of life, and send up feeble saplings again from
their roots when they are cut down. But we builders with the
sword perish boldly; our dying shall be perfect and solemn, as
our warring; we give up our lives without reluctance, and for
ever.