The flames glide bright as water before my eyes, bright as staring eyes that ache with the very brightness of blue Venetian water, the water that flows past the zattere, bright with little staring flames that hurt my eyes as I stood staring that Saint Mark's Day the water was all alight in April sun, the gondolas appeared like black shadows drifting across the uninterrupted brightness of the canal, while the air shivered with the clangor of bells, the honey-sweet stench of the effluent tide, and everywhere the boccolo, the tight-wrapped crimson bud clasped again and again by every blooming girl - the white-skinned and the Mora, the soft black eyes and those as blue as the lagoon, tangled strands of gold, or Titian red, or curling chestnut of Bellini's Madonna.  There was music everywhere - the music of water, and of sunlight slipping over the stones, the green whoosh of waves against the piers, and then there were mandolins, guitars, golden harps; there were lions everywhere, and roses - red, always red roses.  The sun was hot, but the wind sighed.  The wind bore tales of heartbreak and remorse that made me suddenly want to weep.  I ate a piece of cake.  I drank some wine.  If I hold my hand up now before the fire, it casts a shadow no bigger than my Rose was then.  Rosa.  Rosalba.  The white rose I plucked on the day of the red.  She was wearing a dress of Venetian blue silk, a sky-and-water dress, a blue dress, as Titian once painted her for the ancient Scuola della Carità that she might stand forever on the threshold of the temple, holding up the skirt of her dress with her right hand in a gesture at once so childlike, so innocent of all intention to please, and yet so refined, we know her at once for the little Queen of Heaven.  She stood in that black place, that School of Love, where love had learned to take delight in pain, where wounds flourished like flowers, and the blood blossomed red under the whip, spurting even to the carved and gilded ceiling.  Her cheek was ever rounded and soft, her  bosom quiet under its modest covering of blue and white.  When she stepped that Saint Mark's Day out of the boat onto the zattere she was no bigger than the shadow of my hand.

          I sat in the sun and stared.  As I am staring now.  My eyes hurt me.  As they do now.  There were bright flames over the water as I sat and stared and she grew larger (she drew closer) she was looking straight ahead, not from side to side as most children do.  With her right hand she held up the skirt of her dress, a blue silk dress, a sky-and-water dress that rippled like water and shimmered like the sky.  She was looking ahead, she looked thoughtfully into my face.  I was eating a piece of cake.  I had been drinking wine.  The sunlight slid over her young cheeks, her golden hair, and came to rest upon the necklace of blue beads about her throat.  Blue glass beads.  Fashioned in some infernal oven for the purposeful destruction of men's souls.  Blue glass beads about a white throat.

          My head was hot.  My hands, on the other hand, ice cold.  I followed her to the Salute.  I thought it odd she should be alone, for she was not a child of the people.  I feared lest she come to some mischief.  Therefore I followed her as far as the Salute.  I saw her go into the church.  I stood about on the white steps for a long agonizing moment.  Across the water the Ducal Palace was no bigger than a pink and white cake, and the domes of Saint Mark's appeared like so many flies hovering about the cake.  The twin columns thrust up into the tender sky.  The lagoon was thick with floats and gondolas, high-masted ships with crimson sails, gold-stamped banners unfurling their silken tresses in the wind, and, like a centerpiece, the pink and white float of Mary's crown.  From over the water came stray, broken notes of music, the fragments of a vulgar Austrian waltz borne on the inconstant wind.  I lingered in agony on the steps, looking down into the rippling white crown of the Salute carried on the changeful waters of the lagoon.  My head was hot.  I lingered and was lost.  The scent of a white Rose lured me on.  With blackness before my eyes and a taste of blackest bile in my mouth I managed somehow to mount the steps and enter the church.  Too late.  The great white drum was empty.  My Rose was nowhere to be seen.  A lone dove fluttered in the dome above my head, and the votive lights glowed like crimson buds scattered in the snow.

          Joanna has come in with the tea.  Outside it is already dark, then, and the wind in the chimney may indeed be real.  She wishes that I would speak, but I simply haven't anything to say.  Perhaps if Rosie were here, I might speak to her.  Or perhaps I might simply crush out her life in the agony of my desire and shame and love.  Now I have upset the teacup.  I'm sorry, Joanna.  But she doesn't seem to mind.  She thinks I am out of my mind, and can't help it.

          It is one of the many ironies of an ever-inventive Fate that my name has become inextricably linked with that of a place I learned to loathe with all my soul - Venice.  Whatever she may have been when she raised the white walls of the cathedral at Torcello, or paved the church of Saint Mark with all the brightest baubles of Byzantium, today Venice is a house of ill-fame, and her children are bartered instead of silks or lace, nor are they half so dear.

          On the great west wall at Torcello is a mosaic - quite the finest thing of its kind I have ever seen.  It has not the hieratic beauty, the stillness that bespeaks the Absolute, which is so prevalent in the best work at Saint Mark's.  It is manifestly Italian, full of life and humour, near to Tintoret and Veronese in its extraordinary eloquence of gesture, yet I think it can hardly be later than the twelfth century.  The subject of this great mosaic is the Last Judgement, but I am concerned only with that part of it which depicts the fate of the Damned.  The Saints are redeemed from the ennui of their own studious virtue by the amusing device of the receding halos, whereby we see the first row of saints in toto, the second from the eyebrows up, and, after that, the halos alone in serried ranks behind.  But the Damned!  Here the artist has found a rich vein of inspiration indeed.  A river of fire flows from the side of Christ and engulfs the Damned, who are pictured in a variety of situations appropriate to their sins, such as gluttons who bite their own hands; the envious ones, from out whose naked eye sockets crawl a multitude of snakes; the lustful, who stand naked in the fire; and those without hope, who wail, and gnash their teeth, nearly invisible in the outer darkness.  These last have not even the fires of hell to warm them, but are shut in a cold, dark cell where no light ever penetrates, not even corpse light.

          Can there be any question which is the worst fate?  Yet the dark and the cold once seemed to me safe.  Now the closest I can come to the fire is this, here, where I sit.  I am not, I think, a brave man.  I say this in all honesty, from the vantage point of old age, and hindsight, and the lucidity of madness if you will.  But suppose I had taken that moonlight ride on an April night across the stinking Stygian water, suppose I had climbed into Charon's black boat, the long thin shape of which has so often been likened to a dead man's permanent abode, and suppose, after all and just this once, I went gliding in the moonlight down the narrow canals from which the vapors rise in pale, odorous clouds, stinking of something unbearable, honey-sweet, intensely desirable and intensely desired, while just below the surface of the shallow, polluted water the ghouls lift their dead white faces to stare at the moon.  The stones of Venice were here all falling into the sea, the plaster and marble peeled away like skin, leaving open sores that bled into the canals.  The moonlight caught upon ripped lacework of white Istrian stone.  I heard the throbbing voices of unseen doves, the flutter of their startled wings, I heard the splash of the oar, the slip and slosh of the water sliding under the boat, colliding with the walls of palaces oblivious in their death agonies.  Suppose I had gone out that night?  I don't say I did, but then, neither do I deny it.  In a gondola one is at once in love with easeful death - its rhythm, at once reminiscent and provocative, speaks to us of the heart's untamed and barbarous desires in the hushed tones usually reserved for sleepless children.  Merely to set foot in a gondola is already to occupy a position of some moral ambiguity.  And I have doubtless been many times in a gondola.

          Picture, then, the house to which I was taken that night.  It stands at the end of a dark rio, a place where the tide is stagnant, choked with debris.  There is a wall into which three graceful ogives have been cut, each with its own dress of white tracery, and through these apertures the lilacs were peeping; drooping their pomaded heads over the dark water and wafting their wanton sweet-scented abundance upon the night air.  I ascended the slippery steps to the garden.  A servant was there to receive me - he was dressed in white satin with facings of gold lace,  satin knee breeches and coat, a glimmering white tricorne.  He took my hat and bade me take a seat.  I sat under the lilacs and waited.  At last an old hag came out.  She was dressed all in black.  She took me by the hand and led me into the house and up a very dark, narrow stair where I could see nothing.   At the top of the stair was a small boudoir furnished in blue silk.  I had to pay over the money first.  Then the old hag went away, and the white Rose came in, holding up her dress with her right hand, holding up the skirt of her blue silk dress in a gesture at once so regal, so naïve, I would have known her at once for the little Queen of Heaven even had she not been wearing the crown of twelve stars upon her golden hair.

More about John Ruskin: NOTES ON THE LAKE DISTRICT        TWO POEMS FOR JOHN RUSKIN