p regretting that Ruskin lost this opportunity of
familiarizing himself with the early Greek art which, twenty years later
he tried to expound. For the time he was well enough employed on the
"Stones of Venice." He tells the story of this ten months' stay in a
letter to his venerable friend Rogers the poet, dated June 23 (1852).

"I was out of health and out of heart when I first got here. There
came much painful news from home, and then such a determined course
of bad weather, and every other kind of annoyance, that I never was
in a temper fit to write to anyone: the worst of it was that I lost
all _feeling_ of Venice, and this was the reason both of my not
writing to you and of my thinking of you so often. For whenever I
found myself getting utterly hard and indifferent I used to read
over a little bit of the 'Venice' in the 'Italy' and it put me
always into the right tone of thought again, and for this I cannot
be enough grateful to you. For though I believe that in the summer,
when Venice is indeed lovely, when pomegranate blossoms hang over
every garden-wall, and green sunlight shoots through every wave,
custom will not destroy, or even weaken, the impression conveyed at
first; it is far otherwise in the length and bitterness of the
Venetian winters. Fighting with frosty winds at every turn of the
canals takes away all the old feelings of peace and stillness; the
protracted cold makes the dash of the water on the walls a sound of
simple discomfort, and some wild and dark day in February one
starts to find oneself actually balancing in one's mind the
relative advantages of land and water carriage, comparing the Canal
with Piccadilly, and even hesitating whether for the rest of one's
life one would rather have a gondola within call or a hansom."

He then goes on to lament the decay of Venice, the idleness and
dissipation of the populace, the lottery gambling; and to forebode the
"destruction of old buildings and erection of new" changing the place
"into a modern town--a bad imitation of Paris." Better than that he
thinks would be utter neglect; St. Mark's Place would again be, what it
was in the early ages, a green field, and the front of the Ducal Palace
and the marble shafts of St. Mark's would be rooted in wild violets and
wreathed with vines:

"She will be beautiful again then, and I could almos