234 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

APHORISM 30.²

nor in its gold.¹ Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth, and of the limits of the sea, maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character, till it has been entrusted with the fame, and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than that of the natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so much as these possess, of language and of life.

§ 11. For that period, then, we must build; not, indeed, refusing to ourselves the delight of present completion, nor hesitating to follow such portions of character as may depend upon delicacy of execution to the highest perfection of which they are capable, even although we may know that in the course of years such details must perish; but taking care that for work of this kind we sacrifice no enduring quality, and that the building shall not depend for its impressiveness upon any thing that is perishable. This would, indeed, be the law of

¹ [The MS. adds “,it is not in its fair columns or fine front.”]

² [The text of this aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from “For, indeed, the greatest glory ...” down to the end of § 10. In his Notes on Prout and Hunt (1879), Ruskin reprinted in an Appendix this § 10, and also §§ 16, 17; and referring (Preface, § 23) to their justification of the love of ruggedness in buildings-“dependent on just reverence for signs of antiquity,”-added that “openness of joint and roughness of masonry are not exclusively signs of age or decay,” and that he “did not at that time enough insist on the propriety, and even the grace, of such forms of literal ‘rustication’ as are compelled by coarseness of materials.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]