, and
never made you happier as you passed beneath them, do not think they
have any mysterious goodness nor 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 gas-light of the ball-room, you may
know, as I told you that you should, 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.

Sec. VII. And now come with me, for I have kept you too long from your
gondola: come with me, on an autumnal morning, through the dark gates of
Padua, and let us take the broad road leading towards the East.

It lies level, for a league or two, between its elms, and vine festoons
full laden, their thin leaves veined into scarlet hectic, and their
clusters deepened into gloomy blue; then mounts an embankment above the
Brenta, and runs between the river and the broad plain, which stretches
to the north in endless lines of mulberry and maize. The Brenta flows
slowly, but strongly; a muddy volume of yellowish-grey water, that
neither hastens nor slackens, but glides heavily between its monotonous
banks, with here and there a short, babbling eddy twisted for an instant
into its opaque surface, and vanishing, as if something had been dragged
into it and gone down. Dusty and shadeless, the road fares along the
dyke on its northern side; and the tall white tower of Dolo is seen
trembling in the heat mist far away, and never seems nearer than it did
at first. Presently you pass one of the much vaunted "villas on the
Brenta:" a glaring, spectral shell of brick and stucco, its windows with
painted architraves like picture-frames, and a court-yard paved with
pebbles in front of it, all burning in the thick glow of the feverish
sunshine, but fenced from the high road, for magnificence sake, with
goodly posts and chains; then another, of Kew Gothic, with Chinese
variations, painted red and green; a third composed for the greater
part of dead-wall, with fictitious windows painted upon it, each with a
pea-green blind, and a classical architrave in bad perspective; and a
fourth, with stucco figures set on the