ter times the revel of the earth, the
masque of Italy; and _therefore_ is she now desolate: but her glorious
robe of gold and purple was given her when first she rose a vestal from
the sea, not when she became drunk with the wine of her fornication.

Sec. XXXVI. And we have never yet looked with enough reverence upon the
separate gift which was thus bestowed upon her; we have never enough
considered what an inheritance she has left us, in the works of those
mighty painters who were the chief of her children. That inheritance is
indeed less than it ought to have been, and other than it ought to have
been; for before Titian and Tintoret arose,--the men in whom her work
and her glory should have been together consummated,--she had already
ceased to lead her sons in the way of truth and life, and they erred
much, and fell short of that which was appointed for them. There is no
subject of thought more melancholy, more wonderful, than the way in
which God permits so often His best gifts to be trodden under foot of
men, His richest treasures to be wasted by the moth, and the mightiest
influences of His Spirit, given but once in the world's history, to be
quenched and shortened by miseries of chance and guilt. I do not wonder
at what men Suffer, but I wonder often at what they Lose. We may see how
good rises out of pain and evil; but the dead, naked, eyeless loss, what
good comes of that? The fruit struck to the earth before its ripeness;
the glowing life and goodly purpose dissolved away in sudden death; the
words, half spoken, choked upon the lips with clay for ever; or,
stranger than all, the whole majesty of humanity raised to its fulness,
and every gift and power necessary for a given purpose, at a given
moment, centred in one man, and all this perfected blessing permitted to
be refused, perverted, crushed, cast aside by those who need it
most,--the city which is Not set on a hill, the candle that giveth light
to None that are in the house:--these are the heaviest mysteries of this
strange world, and, it seems to me, those which mark its curse the most.
And it is true that the power with which this Venice had been entrusted,
was perverted, when at its highest, in a thousand miserable ways; still,
it was possessed by her alone; to her all hearts have turned which could
be moved by its manifestation, and none without being made stronger and
nobler by what her hand had wrought. That mighty Landscape, of dark
mountains that gua