des, nothing is worth doing except
what the world says is impossible.

Still, you do not care to be answered merely by a paradox. What are the
relations of the artist to the external world, and what is the result of
the loss of beautiful surroundings to you, is one of the most important
questions of modern art; and there is no point on which Mr. Ruskin so
insists as that the decadence of art has come from the decadence of
beautiful things; and that when the artist can not feed his eye on
beauty, beauty goes from his work.

I remember in one of his lectures, after describing the sordid aspect of
a great English city, he draws for us a picture of what were the artistic
surroundings long ago.

Think, he says, in words of perfect and picturesque imagery, whose beauty
I can but feebly echo, think of what was the scene which presented
itself, in his afternoon walk, to a designer of the Gothic school of
Pisa--Nino Pisano or any of his men {317}:

On each side of a bright river he saw rise a line of brighter palaces,
arched and pillared, and inlaid with deep red porphyry, and with
serpentine; along the quays before their gates were riding troops of
knights, noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and shield; horse
and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming light--the purple,
and silver, and scarlet fringes flowing over the strong limbs and
clashing mail, like sea-waves over rocks at sunset. Opening on each
side from the river were gardens, courts, and cloisters; long
successions of white pillars among wreaths of vine; leaping of
fountains through buds of pomegranate and orange: and still along the
garden-paths, and under and through the crimson of the pomegranate
shadows, moving slowly, groups of the fairest women that Italy ever
saw--fairest, because purest and thoughtfullest; trained in all high
knowledge, as in all courteous art--in dance, in song, in sweet wit,
in lofty learning, in loftier courage, in loftiest love--able alike to
cheer, to enchant, or save, the souls of men. Above all this scenery
of perfect human life, rose dome and bell-tower, burning with white
alabaster and gold: beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes of mighty
hills, hoary with olive; far in the north, above a purple sea of peaks
of solemn Apennine, the clear, sharp-cloven Carrara mountains sent up
their steadfast flames of marble summit into amber sky; the great sea
it