'
"And all those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and
grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built
about the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening
thunders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to
deepen in our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and dearness
of the simple words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven!'"
The description of the first approach to Venice before the days of
railways will always be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's work as
one of his most characteristic and memorable utterances:--
"In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate survey of
the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the
happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last
hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village,
where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its
valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty
perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers
of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful
and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the
railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to
be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
successive halting place than a new arrangement of glass roofing
and iron girder--there were few moments of which the recollection
was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which, as I
endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought
him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open
lagoon from the canal of Mestre.
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