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 of the mosaic into an uneven surface: the
gold seeming to have become alive and in a way vegetable, and to have
faded and shrunk like autumn leaves.