Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Excerpt from Ruskin as Master of Prose
We may turn now to a passage or two, in which perhaps Ruskin is quite at his best. He has written few things finer, and indeed more exactly truthful, than his picture of the Campagna of Rome. This is in the Preface to the second edition of Modern Painters, 1843.
Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the reader imagine himself for the moment withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty wreck of the bones of men. The long knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the evening wind, and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the sun light. Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around him, as if the dead beneath were struggling in their sleep. Scattered blocks of black stone, four-square remnants of mighty edifices, not one left upon another, lie upon them to keep them down. A dull purple poisonous haze stretches level along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents the red light rests, like dying fire on de filed altars; the blue ridge of the Alban Mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear, quiet sky; Watch-towers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along the promontories of the Apennines. From the plain to the mountains, the Shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the darkness, like Shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourners, passing from a nation's grave.
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