186 THE STONES OF VENICE

because its least voluntary, creations, aided by the fearfulness of the phenomena of nature which are in any wise the ministers of death, and primarily directed by the peculiar ghastliness of expression in the skeleton, itself a species of terrible grotesque in its relation to the perfect human frame.

§ 66. Thus, first born from the dusty and dreadful whiteness of the charnel-house, but softened in their forms by the holiest of human affections, went forth the troop of wild and wonderful images, seen through tears, that had the mastery over our Northern hearts for so many ages.¹ The powers of sudden destruction lurking in the woods and waters, in the rocks and clouds;-kelpie and gnome, Lurlei and Hartz spirits; the wraith and foreboding phantom; the spectra of second sight; the various conceptions of avenging or tormented ghost, haunting the perpetrator of crime, or expiating its commission; and the half fictitious and contemplative, half visionary and believed images of the presence of death itself, doing its daily work in the chambers of sickness and sin, and waiting for its hour in the fortalices of strength and the high places of pleasure;-these, partly degrading us by the instinctive and paralyzing terror with which they are attended, and partly ennobling us by leading our thoughts to dwell in the eternal world, fill the last and the most important circle in that great kingdom of dark and distorted power, of which we all must be in some sort the subjects until mortality shall be swallowed up of life; until the waters of the last fordless river cease to roll their untransparent volume between us and the light of heaven, and neither death stand between us and our brethren, nor symbols between us and our God.

§ 67. We have now, I believe, obtained a view approaching to completeness of the various branches of human feeling which are concerned in the development of this peculiar form of art. It remains for us only to note, as briefly as possible, what facts in the actual history of the grotesque bear upon our immediate subject.

¹ [See Ruskin’s early poem, “The Emigration of the Sprites,” Vol. II. p. 10.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]