CH. III THE LAMP OF POWER 101

distinctively marked by features of beauty or of power, there will be swept away, in multitudes, the memories of buildings, perhaps, in their first address to our minds, of no inferior pretension, but owing their impressiveness to characters of less enduring nobility-to value of material, accumulation of ornament, or ingenuity of mechanical construction. Especial interest may, indeed, have been awakened by such circumstances, and the memory may have been, consequently, rendered tenacious of particular parts or effects of the structure; but it will recall even these only by an active effort, and then without emotion; while in passive moments and with thrilling influence, the images of purer beauty, and of more spiritual power, will return in a fair and solemn company; and while the pride of many a stately palace, and the wealth of many a jewelled shrine, perish from our thoughts in a dust of gold, there will rise, through their dimness, the white image of some secluded marble chapel, by river or forest side, with the fretted flower-work shrinking under its arches, as if under vaults of late-fallen snow; or the vast weariness of some shadowy wall whose separate stones are like mountain foundations, and yet numberless.

APHORISM 17. The two intellectual powers of Architecture, veneration and dominion.²

§ 2. Now, the difference between these two orders of building is not merely that which there is in nature between things beautiful and sublime. It is, also, the difference between what is derivative and original in man’s work;¹ for whatever is in architecture fair or beautiful, is imitated from natural forms; and what is not so derived, but depends for its dignity upon arrangement and government received from human mind, becomes the expression of the power of that mind, and receives a sublimity

¹ [See Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vi. § 40, where this distinction is further dwelt upon. The following sentence in the text is the kernel of much of Ruskin’s teaching. “The law which it has been my effort chiefly to illustrate,” he says in The Two Paths (preface to ed. 1), “is the dependence of all noble design, in any kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form.”]

² [The text of this aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is the whole of § 2. For the sense of “dominion” in the summary of the aphorism, see above, p. 28 n., and below, p. 138 n.]

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