"The Stones of Venice" [.]

[fiefoe]

Finally, Venice:
__ ... and so wait, until the bright investiture and sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation.
__ A multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, celled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory,... {Now to compare this with 朱自清《威尼斯》.}
__ the frank diffusion of light

In praise of Gothic 'rudeness':

• instinct with a work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them
• this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp
• And the love of change, which becomes morbid and feverish in following the haste of the hunter and the rage of the combatant, is at once soothed and satisfied as it watches the wandering of the tendril, and the budding of the flower.
• Last, because the least essential, of the constituent elements of this noble school, was placed that of Redundance; the uncalculating bestowal of the wealth of its labour.
• The richness of the work is... a part of its humility. No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple; which refuses to address the eye... which implies, in offering so little to our regards, that all it has offered is perfect.
• (Doge's Palace:) In this arrangement there is one of the most remarkable instances I know of the daring sacrifice of symmetry to convenience, which was noticed as one of the chief noblenesses of the Gothic schools.
• The most characteristic sentiment (in the Gothic heart) was the frank confession of its own weakness, the principal element in the Renaissance spirit is its firm confidence in its own wisdom.
  

Its opposite:

• The first thing that it demanded in all work was, that it should be done in a consummate and learned way; and men altogether forgot that it was possible to consummate what was contemptible, and to know what was useless.
• Wherever the workman is utterly enslaved, the parts of the building must of course be absolutely like each other; for the perfection of his execution can only be reached by exercising him in doing (only) one thing... if, as in Greek work... then the degradation is complete.
• They were left to felicitate themselves on their small science and their neat fingering.
  
• Forms in which the consummate refinement almost atones for the loss of force.
  
• There was not strength enough in them to be proud, nor forethought enough to be ambitious.

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