CH. I THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE 53

uninquiring eye; and all its minuteness does not diminish the majesty, while it increases the mystery, of the noble and unbroken vault. It is not less the boast of some styles that they can bear ornament, than of others that they can do without it; but we do not often enough reflect that those very styles, of so haughty simplicity, owe part of their pleasurableness to contrast, and would be wearisome if universal. They are but the rests and monotones of the art; it is to its far happier, far higher, exaltation that we owe those fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever filled the depth of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves; those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations. All else for which the builders sacrificed, has passed away-all their living interests, and aims, and achievements. We know not for what they laboured, and we see no evidence of their reward. Victory, wealth, authority, happiness-all have departed, though bought by many a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their life and their toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray heaps¹ of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honours, and their errors; but they have left us their adoration.²

¹ [The MS. shows that Ruskin here tried other words-first “eminences” and then “shadows,” before finally selecting “heaps.”]

² [With “The Lamp of Sacrifice” may be compared Wordsworth’s first sonnet on King’s College Chapel, Cambridge:-

“Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,

With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned-

Albeit labouring for a scanty band

Of white-robed Scholars only-this immense

And glorious Work of fine intelligence!

Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore

Of nicely-calculated less or more.”

cf. also Renan’s “Prayer on the Acropolis” in his Recollections of My Youth (English ed., 1892, p. 52): “What adds so much to the beauty of the buildings is their absolute honesty and the respect shown to the Divinity. The parts of the building not seen by the public are as well constructed as those which meet the eye; and there are none of those deceptions which, in French churches more particularly, give the idea of being intended to mislead the Divinity as to the value of the offering.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]