soul during the
delirium of a fever. Some of them (described only from memory of Mr.
Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of
which stood all sorts of engines and machinery expressive of enormous
power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of
the walls, you perceived a staircase, and upon it, groping his way
upward, was Piranesi himself. Follow the stairs a little farther and
you perceive it to come to a sudden, abrupt termination, without any
balustrade, and allowing no step onward to him who had reached the
extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor
Piranesi? You suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way
terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of
stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this
time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eyes,
and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor
Piranesi on his aspiring labours, and so on, until the unfinished
stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall."

This plate was evidently one of the Carceri set--sixteen in all--which
the etcher improvised after some severe cerebral malady. What would we
not give to have heard the poet of Kubla Khan describing the fantastic
visions of the Venetian artist to the English opium eater! The
eloquence of the prose passage we have transcribed has in it some
faint echoes of Coleridge's golden rumble. That these two men
appreciated the Italian is something; perhaps they saw chiefly in his
work its fantastic side. There was no saner craftsman than Piranesi
apart from certain of his plates; no more solid construction in a
print can be shown than his various interpretations of the classic
ruins of Rome, the temples at Paestum. He was a great engraver and
etcher whose passion was the antique. He deliberately withdrew from
all commerce with the ideas and art of his own times. He loved
architecture for architecture's sake; not as a decoration, not as a
background for humanity, but as something personal. It was for him
what the human face was for Rembrandt and Velasquez. That he was
called the Rembrandt of Architecture is but another testimony to the
impression he made upon his contemporaries, though the title is an
unhappy one. Piranesi even in his own little fenced-off coign of art
is not comparable to the etcher of the Hundred Guilder print, nor are
the