CH. III THE LAMP OF POWER 103

the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky;¹ for these, and other glories more than these, refuse not to connect themselves, in his thoughts, with the work of his own hand; the grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some Cyclopean waste of mural stone; the pinnacles of the rocky promontory arrange themselves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of fortress towers; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast from the images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered cities melt in their mortality.

§ 4. Let us, then, see what is this power and majesty, which Nature herself does not disdain to accept from the works of man; and what that sublimity in the masses built up by his coralline-like energy, which is honourable, even when transferred by association to the dateless hills, which it needed earthquakes to lift, and deluges to mould.

And, first, of mere size: It might not be thought possible to emulate the sublimity of natural objects in this respect; nor would it be, if the architect contended with them in pitched battle. It would not be well to build pyramids in the valley of Chamouni; and St. Peter’s, among its many other errors, counts for not the least injurious its position on the slope of an inconsiderable hill.² But imagine it placed on the plain of Marengo, or like the Superga of Turin, or³ like La Salute at Venice! The fact is, that the apprehension of the size of natural objects, as well as of architecture, depends more on fortunate excitement of the imagination than on measurements by the eye; and the architect has a peculiar advantage in being able to press close upon the sight such

¹ [For “and lifts ... sky,” the MS. first reads, “and sets the mighty aisles of mountain chasms with pinnacles of pine”-and then as the text, but with “pale gold of the morning sky.”]

² [Cf. on this point The Poetry of Architecture, §§ 44, 222, Vol. I. pp. 37, 164; and review of Lord Lindsay, On the Old Road, 1899, vol. i. § 30.]

³ [The MS. inserts “best of all.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]