139. Now, these buttresses present one of the most extraordinary and
striking instances of the beauty of adaptation of style to locality and
peculiarity of circumstance, that can be met with in the whole range of
architectural investigation. Taken in the abstract, they are utterly
detestable, formal, clumsy, and apparently unnecessary. Their builder
thinks so himself: he hates them as things to be looked at, though he
erects them as things to be depended upon. He has no idea that there is
any propriety in their presence, though he knows perfectly well that
there is a great deal of necessity; and, therefore he builds them.
Where? On rocks whose sides are one mass of buttresses, of precisely the
same form; on rocks which are cut and cloven by basalt and lava dikes
of every size, and which, being themselves secondary, wear away
gradually by exposure to the atmosphere, leaving the intersecting dikes
standing out in solid and vertical walls, from the faces of their
precipices. The eye passes over heaps of scoriae and sloping banks of
ashes, over the huge ruins of more ancient masses, till it trembles for
the fate of the crags still standing round; but it finds them ribbed
with basalt like bones, buttressed with a thousand lava walls, propped
upon pedestals and pyramids of iron, which the pant and the pulse of the
earthquake itself can scarcely move, for they are its own work; it
climbs up to their summits, and there it finds the work of man; but it
is no puny domicile, no eggshell imagination, it is in a continuation of
the mountain itself, inclined at the same slope, ribbed in the same
manner, protected by the same means against the same danger; not,
indeed, filling the eye with delight, but, which is of more importance,
freeing it from fear, and beautifully corresponding with the prevalent
lines around it, which a less massive form would have rendered, in some
cases, particularly about Etna, even ghastly.
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