and he awakes, in fancy, on some
pinnacle above St. Mark's Square, overlooking the Carnival. Here his
power of artistic divination--alias of human sympathy, is called into
play; for the men and women below him all wear the semblance of some
human deformity, of some animal type, or of some grotesque embodiment of
human feeling or passion. He throws himself into their midst, and these
monstrosities disappear. The human asserts itself; the brute-like
becomes softened away; what imperfection remains creates pity rather
than disgust. He finds that by shifting his point of view, he can see
even necessary qualities in what otherwise struck him as faults.

Another change takes place: one felt more easily than defined; and he
becomes aware that he is looking not on Venice, but on the world, and
that what seemed her Carnival is in reality the masquerade of life. The
change goes on. Halls and temples are transformed beneath his gaze. The
systems which they represent: religions, philosophies, moralities, and
theories of art, collapse before him, re-form and collapse again. He
sees that the deepest truth can only build on sand, though itself is
stationed on a rock; and can only assert its substance in the often
changing forms of error. The vision seems to declare that change is the
Law of Life.

"Not so," it was about to say. "That law is permanence." The scene has
resembled the forming and reforming, the blending and melting asunder of
a pile of sunset clouds. Like these, when the sun has set, it is
subsiding into a fixed repose, a stern and colourless uniformity.
Temple, tower, and dwelling-house assume the form of one solitary
granite pile, a Druid monument. This monument, as Mr. Browning describes
it,[54] consists really of two, so standing or lying as to form part of
each other. The one cross-shaped is supposed to have been sepulchral, or
in some other way sacred to death. The latter, on which he mainly
dwells, was, until lately, the centre of a rude nature-worship, and is
therefore consecrated to life. It symbolizes life in its most active and
most perennial form. It means the force which aspires to heaven, and the
strength which is rooted in the earth. It means that impulse of all
being towards something outside itself, which is constant amidst all
change, uniform amidst all variety. It means the last word of the scheme
of creation, and therefore also the first. It repeats and concludes the
utterance already sounding in the