[8] I could not see this symbol at the height at which the picture hung from the ground, when I described it in 1872. The folds of the drapery in the hand are all but invisible, even when the picture is seen close; and so neutral in their gray-green colour that they pass imperceptibly into violet, as the faint green of evening sky fades into its purple. But the folds are continued under the wrist in the alternate waves which the reader may see on the Etruscan tomb in the first room of the British Museum, with a sculpturesque severity which I could not then understand, and could only account for by supposing that Carpaccio had meant the Princess to “dream out the angel’s dress so particularly”! I mistook the fillet of victory also for a scroll; and could not make out the flowers in the window. They are pinks, the favourite ones in Italian windows to this day, and having a particular relation to St. Ursula in the way they rend their calyx; and I believe also in their peculiar relation to the grasses, (of which more in ‘Proserpina’). St. Ursula is not meant, herself, to recognize the angel. He enters under the door over which she has put her little statue of Venus; and through that door the room is filled with light, so that it will not seem to her strange [[359]]that his own form, as he enters, should be in shade: and she cannot see his dark wings. On the tassel of her pillow, (Etrurian also,) is written “Infantia”; and above her head, the carving of the bed ends in a spiral flame, typical of the finally ascending Spirit. She lies on her bier, in the last picture but one, exactly as here on her bed; only the coverlid is there changed from scarlet to pale violet. See notes on the meaning of these colours in third ‘Deucalion.’ [↑]
[9] May St. George be informed of how many members the American Legislature is finally to be composed; and over whom it is to exercise the proud function of legislation, which is to be the reward of heroic and rightly-minded flunkeys? [↑]
[10] As a painter, no less than a philanthropist, I am curious to see the effect of scenery, in these ‘polite’ terms of description, “dotted over with establishments.” [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER LXXII.
Venice, 9th November, 1876, 7 morning.
I have set my writing-table close to the pillars of the great window of the Ca’ Ferro, which I drew, in 1841, carefully, with those of the next palace, Ca’ Contarini Fasan. Samuel Prout was so pleased with the sketch that he borrowed it, and made the upright drawing from it of the palace with the rich balconies, ‘which now represents his work very widely as a chromolithotint.[1]
Between the shafts of the pillars, the morning sky is seen pure and pale, relieving the grey dome of the church of the Salute; but beside that vault, and like it, vast thunderclouds heap themselves above the horizon, catching the light of dawn upon them where they rise, far westward, over the dark roof of the ruined Badia;—but all so massive, that, half an hour ago, in the dawn, I scarcely knew the Salute dome and towers [[378]]from theirs; while the sea-gulls, rising and falling hither and thither in clusters above the green water beyond my balcony, tell me that the south wind is wild on Adria.
“Dux inquieti turbidus Adriæ.”—The Sea has her Lord, and the sea-birds are prescient of the storm; but my own England, ruler of the waves in her own proud thoughts, can she rule the tumult of her people, or, pilotless, even so much as discern the thunderclouds heaped over her Galilean lake of life?