INTRODUCTION xxvii

them; but through their dark alleys I saw the horizontal brightness of the lagoon sunshine, and over the hard frozen snow made my way down to the shore. The sky was all serene white blue; the lagoon, as calm as a mirror, reflected it in a metallic aqua marine; only its strong tide was seen gliding and curdling in one flat mass of shallow water that seemed to move altogether without break orwave, and the far-away islands seemed gliding the opposite way. The water was not bright, only lustrous and of delicate metallic colour,-for the sun was too low to make it luminous, and the lower sky was hazy, and all of deep tone, so deep that Murano and St. Cristoforo, which caught the sunset light full, seemed coming out of the dark haze in one long bar of crimson light, which the eye felt, even when it was directed elsewhere, in its constant and intense presence. Far away out of the mist the endless range of the Alps lifted their jagged ridge of silver; melting into orange light towards the west, where the flat mainland showed its dark line across their ghostly distance: the single square mass of the Church of Mestre being the only object that broke its monotony. Close beside me, the green clear sea-water lay quietly among the muddy shingles of the level shore, so calm that it made a little islet at the edge of it, of every stone; as clear as a mountain stream and with here and there a large block of marble marking the outmost foundations of Venice.

It was a favourite theme with Ruskin that all ornament should be based on the animal or organic kingdom. Here, too, in the midst of his notes on Venetian architecture, it is interesting to come across a description of the sea-gulls and their colours:-

“It was lovely to see them in the grey darkness of the snowy sky with the deep local green of the sea-the dark canal reflected on their white under bodies in a dim chrysoprase, opposed to the purply grey of their backs. Their wings are edged with white in front, and they were pausing continually at one or two feet above the water, flapping their wings slowly like moths.”

But by the time his work was done, Ruskin’s impressions-if we may trust his recollections in a letter of a somewhat later date-had lost their brightness; Venice had become to him all mouldings-and mud. The piece is worth giving here, as showing (behind an obvious and a characteristic strain of humorous exaggeration) the inconveniences and vexations under which his Venetian work was done. He is writing to a friend at Venice:-

May, 1859.-... I went through so much hard, dry, mechanical toil there, that I quite lost, before I left it, the charm of the place. Analysis is an abominable business. I am quite sure that people who

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