I. THE THRONE 7

chosen for the mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in nature was wild or merciless,-Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests,-had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea.

§ 2. And although the last few eventful years,¹ fraught with change to the face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their influence on Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and though many of her palaces are for ever defaced, and many in desecrated ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin, and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are little to be envied,* in whose hearts the great charities of the imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is ignoble, and disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the imagination there must be no permission during the task which is before us. The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and

* This is a true, and, as far as I can judge of my own writing, one of my best finished passages, to the close of the paragraph; except that the charity of imagination, in the beginning of the clause, should have been more directly connected with the indolence of the imagination at its end. [1879.]

¹ [Written, it will be remembered, in 1851-1852, in a time of political revolution, railway and telegraph extension, and “Progresso” generally (see in the next volume, ch. i. § 32 n).-which seemed to all to open a new earth, and to many (though not to Ruskin) a new heaven. For the railway and other “improvements” at Venice, see Vol. IV. pp. 40-41.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]