188 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

rude as it is, will nevertheless give the reader some better conception of that tower’s magnificence than the thin outlines in which it is usually pourtrayed. In its first appeal to the stranger’s eye there is something unpleasing; a mingling, as it seems to him, of over severity with over minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other consummate art. I remember well how, when a boy,¹ I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight,² and I shall not soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the Northern Gothic,³ when I afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The contrast is indeed strange, if it could be quickly felt, between the rising of those grey walls out of their quiet swarded space, like dark and barren rocks out of a green lake, with their rude, mouldering,

¹ [Ruskin’s first visit to Florence was in 1840, when he was disappointed with its architecture: see Vol. I. pp. 380, 432.]

² [See extracts from Ruskin’s letters of 1845, in Vol. IV. pp. 351-352.]

³ [The MS. has “at noon and morning and moving midnight, and I shall not soon forget with what an impression of savage, profound, and gloomy barbarism I was struck, when ...” The first draft of this passage occurs in Ruskin’s diary of 1848:-

“SALISBURY CATHEDRAL.-On the whole, the carving of this cathedral, more especially of the west front, is, as compared with a piece of that of Florence, perfectly savage, and reminds one of the carvings of an Indian’s paddle. What a contrast between the swarded space-all sounding over with nibbling of sheep, and the rising out of it of the grey walls, like old steep rocks out of a green lake, and the weedy and shadowy recesses between the transepts, and the rude, mouldering, massy, rough-grained shafts, and triple lights without tracery or other ornament than the martins’ nests in the height of them;-and that populous, trodden, history-haunted square,-that warm, bright, smooth, marble seat against the wall,-that jaspery variegated surface,-those spiral shafts of glittering mosaic and leafy mouldings, rich with birds and fruit, those fairy traceries of white, faint, crystalline lines of alabaster,-that campanile, coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea shell.”

Ruskin had felt something of the same contrast at Abbeville too :-

“It is most fortunate that I have come here,” he writes home from Abbeville (Aug. 8, 1848), “straight from Salisbury-not even blunting at Winchester the severe memory of that Gothic; for much as I admired Abbeville porch before, it comes upon me now in such luscious richness,-so full, so fantastic,-so exquisitely picturesque that I seem never to have seen it before.”

See also above, ch. iii. § 24, p. 136, and compare the contrast more elaborately drawn in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. iv. §§ 10-14, between a “grim cathedral of England” and St. Mark’s at Venice.]

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