214 THE STONES OF VENICE II. CHANGEFULNESS

more highly gifted than his fellows. And therefore we may expect that the first two elements of good architecture should be expressive of some great truths commonly belonging to the whole race, and necessary to be understood or felt by them in all their work that they do under the sun. And observe what they are: the confession of Imperfection, and the confession of Desire of Change. The building of the bird and the bee needs not express anything like this. It is perfect and unchanging. But just because we are something better than birds or bees, our building must confess that we have not reached the perfection we can imagine, and cannot rest in the condition we have attained. If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God’s work only may express that; but ours may never have that sentence written upon it,-“And behold, it was very good.”¹ And, observe again, it is not merely as it renders the edifice a book of varous knowledge, or a mine of precious thought, that variety is essential to its nobleness. The vital principle is not the love of Knowledge, but the love of Change. It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied. The Greek could stay in his triglyph furrow, and be at peace; but the work of the Gothic heart² is fretwork still, and it can neither rest in, nor from its labour, but must pass on, sleeplessly, until its love of change shall be pacified for ever in the change that must come alike on them that wake and them that sleep.³

¹ [Genesis i. 31.]

² [Ruskin wrote “heart” (as below p. 359, line 8), and so the word reads in ed. 1, and in the separate issue (On the Nature of Gothic Architecture). In the second and all later editions, and in the Kelmscott and later reprint of the chapter, “art” was substituted.]

³ [See 1 Thessalonians v. 10.]

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