I. THE THRONE 5

coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line,* tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north-a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.† And at last, when its walls

* Nonsense. I might as truly have said “merry-coloured.” It is simply the colour of any other distant country. [1879].

† All this is quite right. The group of precipices above the centre of the Alpine line is the finest I know in any view of the chain from the south, and the extent of white peaks to the north-east always takes me by renewed surprise, in clear evenings.¹ [1879.]

lagoon flowed and rippled under them in great sheets of rose colour with ripples of green. The seagulls were sinking and flitting by toward the south-not the common shrieking gull, but one that gives a low, clear, plaintive whistle of two short notes dying upon the salt wind like a far away human voice. And at last as the sun went down, he sank behind a bank of broken clouds which threw up their shadows as on the opposite page [reference to a sketch] on dark grey horizontal soft bands of vapour, the clear sky seen through, shadowless. When the sun had sunk, the shadows disappeared, but the grey bands became blood colour, and so remained glowing behind the tower of the St. Eufemia, as I rowed back up the Giudecca, growing purple and darker gradually, till their deep crimson became a dark colour on the clear sky behind. Note that at this time of evening one may have-down on the horizon-grey cold clouds, and across them bars of dead crimson of a depth which is light upon the grey cloud but dark against the soft amber of the sky.”]

¹ [Ruskin had noted the same thing in letters to his father (1851):-

“VENICE, November 15.-I do not know if it is the same in Switzerland, but certainly the best views of the Alps, and on the whole the most striking scenery here, of distant effects of every kind, are in the winter.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]