n into indifference by meaningless,
ill-proportioned, or unsightly forms. 'We are forced,' says Mr.
Ruskin, 'for the sake of accumulating our power and knowledge,
to live in cities; but such advantage as we have in association
with each other, is in great part counterbalanced by our loss
of fellowship with nature. We cannot all have our gardens now,
nor our pleasant fields to meditate in at eventide. Then the
function of our architecture is, as far as may be, to replace
these; to tell us about nature; to possess us with memories of
her quietness; to be solemn and full of tenderness like her,
and rich in portraitures of her; full of delicate imagery of
the flowers we can no more gather, and of the living creatures
now far away from us in their own solitude. If ever you felt or
found this in a London street; if ever it furnished you with
one serious thought, or any ray of true and gentle pleasure; if
there is in your heart a true delight in its green railings,
and dark casements, and wasteful finery of shops, and feeble
coxcombry of club-houses, it is well; promote the building of
more like them. But if they never taught you any thing, and
never made you happier as you passed beneath them, do not think
they have any mysterious goodness of occult sublimity. Have
done with the wretched affectation, the futile barbarism, of
pretending to enjoy; for, as surely as you know that the meadow
grass, meshed with fairy rings, is better than the wood
pavement cut into hexagons; and as surely as you know the fresh
winds and sunshine of the upland are better than the choke-damp
of the vault, or the gaslight of the ball-room, you may know
that the good architecture which has life, and truth, and joy
in it, is better than the bad architecture, which has death,
dishonesty, and vexation of heart in it from the beginning to
the end of time.

"To show what this good architecture is, how it is produced,
and to what end, is the object of the present volume. It is,
consequently, purely elementary, and introductory merely to the
illustration, to be furnished in the next volume from the
architectural riches of Venice, of the principles, to the
development of which it is devoted. Beginning from the
beginning, Mr. Ruskin carries his reader through the whole
de