e churches of Rome!

On the summit, the upper church shoots up as brilliant, as aerial, as
triumphant, as this is low and grave. Really, if one were to give way to
conjecture, he might suppose that in these three sanctuaries the
architect meant to represent the three worlds; below, the gloom of death
and the horrors of the infernal tomb; in the middle, the impassioned
anxiety of the beseeching Christian who strives and hopes in this world
of trial; aloft, the bliss and dazzling glory of Paradise.

RAVENNA[30]

BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN

With exceptions, all the monuments of Ravenna belong to the days of
transition from Roman to Medieval times, and the greater part of them
come within the fifth and sixth centuries. It was then that Ravenna
became, for a season, the head of Italy and of the Western world. The
sea had made Ravenna a great haven: the falling back of the sea made her
the ruling city of the earth. Augustus had called into being the port of
Caesarea as the Peiraieus of the Old Thessalian or Umbrian Ravenna.
Haven and city grew and became one; but the faithless element again fell
back; the haven of Augustus became dry land covered by orchards, and
Classis arose as the third station, leaving Ravenna itself an inland
city.

Again has the sea fallen back; Caesarea has utterly perished; Classis
survives only in one venerable church; the famous pine forest has grown
up between the third haven and the now distant Hadriatic. Out of all
this grew the momentary greatness of Ravenna. The city, girded with the
three fold zone of marshes, causeways, and strong walls, became the
impregnable shelter of the later Emperors; and the earliest Teutonic
Kings naturally fixt their royal seat in the city of their Imperial
predecessors. When this immediate need had passed away, the city
naturally fell into insignificance, and it plays hardly any part in the
history of Medieval Italy. Hence it is that the city is crowded with the
monuments of an age which has left hardly any monuments elsewhere.

In Britain, indeed, if Dr. Merivale be right in the date which he gives
to the great Northern wall, we have a wonderful relic of those times;
but it is the work, not of the architect, but of the military engineers.
In other parts of Europe also works of this date are found here and
there; but nowhere save at Ravenna is there a whole city, so to speak,
made up of them. Nowhere but at Ravenna can we find, thickly scattered
around us,