nfirm, lost in dark languor
and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the
tideless pools and the sea-birds flit from their margins with a
questioning cry."

[Sidenote: His love of color.]

Equally characteristic of the painter is the ever-present use of
color. It is interesting merely to count the number and variety of
colors used in the descriptions. It will serve at least to call the
reader's attention to the felicitous choice of words used in
describing the opalescence of St. Mark's or the skillful combination
of the colors characteristic of the great Venetians in such a sentence
as, "the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armor shot angrily under
their blood-red mantle-folds"[14]--a glimpse of a Giorgione.

[Sidenote: His love of prose rhythm.]

He is even more attentive to the ear than to the eye. He loves the
sentence of stately rhythms and long-drawn harmonies, and he omits no
poetic device that can heighten the charm of sound,--alliteration, as
in the famous description of the streets of Venice,

"Far as the eye could reach, still the soft moving of stainless
waters proudly pure; as not the flower, so neither the thorn nor
the thistle could grow in those glancing fields";[15]

the balanced close for some long period,

"to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges and
to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in the
world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from
the burning heart of her Fortitude and splendour";[16]

and the tendency, almost a mannerism, to add to the music of his own
rhythm, the deep organ-notes of Biblical text and paraphrase. But if
we wish to see how aptly Ruskin's style responds to the tone of his
subject, we need but remark the rich liquid sentence descriptive of
Giorgione's home,

"brightness out of the north and balm from the south, and the stars
of evening and morning clear in the limitless light of arched
heaven and circling sea,"[17]

which he has set over against the harsh explosiveness of

"Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, a square brick pit
or wall is formed by a close-set block of house to the back
windows of which it admits a few rays of light--"

the birthplace of Turner.

[Sidenote: His beauty of style often distracts from the thought.]

But none knew better than Ruskin that a style so stiff with ornament
was likely