grasp; but in the process of such reduction to the laws
of man's thought, the universe is shorn of its very power to move
man's emotion and overwhelm his soul. The abstract which we have made
does not vivify us sufficiently. And the emotional communion of man
with nature is through those various faculties which we call aesthetic.
It is not to no purpose that poetry has for ever talked to us of skies
and mountains and waters; we require, for our soul's health, to think
about them otherwise than with reference to our material comfort and
discomfort; we require to feel that they and ourselves are brethren
united by one great law of life. And what poetry suggests in explicit
words, bidding us love and be united in love to external nature; art,
in more irresistible because more instinctive manner, forces upon our
feelings, by extracting, according to its various kinds, the various
vital qualities of the universe, and making them act directly upon our
mind: rhythms of all sorts, static and dynamic, in the spatial arts of
painting and sculpture; in the half spatial, half temporal art of
architecture: in music, which is most akin to life, because it is the
art of movement and change.

X.

We can all remember moments when we have seemed conscious, even to
overwhelming, of this fact. In my own mind it has become indissolubly
connected with a certain morning at Venice, listening to the organ in
St. Mark's.

Any old and beautiful church gives us all that is most moving and
noblest--organism, beauty, absence of all things momentary and
worthless, exclusion of grossness, of brute utility and mean
compromise, equality of all men before God; moreover, time, eternity,
the past, and the great dead. All noble churches give us this; how
much more, therefore, this one, which is noblest and most venerable!

It has, like no other building, been handed over by man to Nature;
Time moulding and tinting into life this structure already so organic,
so fit to live. For its curves and vaultings, its cupolas mutually
supported, the weight of each carried by all; the very colour of the
marbles, brown, blond, living colours, and the irregular symmetry,
flower-like, of their natural patterning, are all seemingly organic and
ready for life. Time has added that, with the polish and dimming
alternately of the marbles, the billowing of the pavement, the
slanting of the columns, and last, but not least, the tarnishing of
the gold and the granulating