178 THE STONES OF VENICE

fell short of that which was appointed for them. There is no subject of thought more melancholy, more wonderful, than the way in which God permits so often His best gifts to be trodden under foot of men, His richest treasures to be wasted by the moth, and the mightiest influences of His Spirit, given but once in the world’s history, to be quenched and shortened by miseries of chance and guilt.¹ I do not wonder at what men Suffer, but I wonder often at what they Lose. We may see how good rises out of pain and evil; but the dead, naked, eyeless loss, what good comes of that? The fruit struck to the earth before its ripeness; the glowing life and goodly purpose dissolved away in sudden death; the words, half spoken, choked upon the lip with clay for ever; or, stranger than all, the whole majesty of humanity raised to its fulness, and every gift and power necessary for a given purpose, at a given moment, centred in one man, and all this perfected blessing permitted to be refused, perverted, crushed, cast aside by those who need it most,-the city which is Not set on a hill, the candle that giveth light to None that are in the house;²-these are the heaviest mysteries of this strange world, and, it seems to me, those which mark its curse the most. And it is true that the power with which this Venice had been entrusted was perverted, when at its highest, in a thousand miserable ways: still, it was possessed by her alone; to her all hearts have turned which could be moved by its manifestation, and none without being made stronger and nobler by what her hand had wrought. That mighty Landscape, of dark mountains that guard the horizon with their purple towers, and solemn forests that gather their weight of leaves, bronzed with sunshine, not with age, into those gloomy masses fixed in heaven, which storm and frost have power no more to shake or shed;³-that mighty Humanity, so perfect and so proud, that hides no weakness

¹ [To this “mystery of life” Ruskin often reverted; see, e.g., Sesame and Lilies, § 102, and Fors Clavigera, Letter 82.]

² [Matthew v. 14, 15.]

³ [For Ruskin’s admiration of the landscape of the Venetian painters, see Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 170), and vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 126).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]