154 THE STONES OF VENICE

demonstrated without laborious measurement, cannot have influence on the beauty of the design. The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far to say, that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the changes of expression in the human countenance. The greater he is, the more he will feel their subtlety, and the intense difficulty of perceiving all their relations, or answering for the consequences of a variation of a hair’s breadth in a single curve. Indeed, there is nothing truly noble either in colour or in form, but its power depends on circumstances infinitely too intricate to be explained, and almost too subtle to be traced. And as for these Byzantine buildings, we only do not feel them because we do not watch them; otherwise we should as much enjoy the variety of proportion in their arches, as we do at present that of the natural architecture of flowers and leaves. Any of us can feel in an instant the grace of the leaf group, b, in the annexed figure; and yet that grace is simply owing to its being proportioned like the façade of St. Mark’s; each leaflet answering to an arch,-the smallest, at the root, to those of the porticos. I have tried to give the proportion quite accurately in b; but as the difference between the second and third leaflets is hardly discernible on so small a scale, it is somewhat exaggerated in a.* Nature is often far more subtle in her proportions. In looking at some of the nobler species of lilies, full in the front of the flower, we may fancy for a moment that they form a symmetrical six-petaled star; but on examining them more closely, we shall find that they are thrown into a group of three magnitudes by the expansion of two of the inner petals above the stamens to a breadth greater than any of the four others; while the third

* I am sometimes obliged, unfortunately, to read my woodcuts backwards, owing to my having forgotten to reverse them on the wood.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]