134 THE STONES OF VENICE IV. INFIDELITY

and insatiable pursuit of pleasure, and from this to irremediable degradation, the transitions were swift, like the falling of a star. The great palaces of the haughtiest nobles of Venice were stayed, before they had risen far above their foundations, by the blast of a penal poverty; and the wild grass, on the unfinished fragments of their mighty shafts, waves at the tide-mark where the power of the godless people first heard the “Hitherto shalt thou come.”¹ And the regeneration in which they had so vainly trusted, -the new birth and clear dawning, as they thought it, of all art, all knowledge, and all hope,-became to them as that dawn which Ezekiel saw on the hills of Israel: “Behold the Day; behold, it is come. The rod hath blossomed, pride hath budded, violence is risen up into a rod of wickedness. None of them shall remain, nor of their multitude; let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.”²

¹ [Job xxxviii. 11.]

² [Ezekiel vii. 10.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]