Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/673

Rh and formidable and peaceful remembrances of death. Death here becomes as beautiful and durable a thing as any other form of what is elsewhere fleeting in human things. There is something terrifying in the eternity of form, color, substance; in Ravenna nothing is lost, everything lasts on, and may sometimes be thought to wish, and be unable, to fade out, or even to grow old visibly.

Lean and ascetic Ravenna has a certain exquisite rigidity in its charm, like that of a crucifix—like that of the strange, severe, and sumptuous crucifix of engraved silver disks in the Cathedral. The streets are long and straight, with sharp angles, rarely a curve: you can look half-way across the city, and see the light through any one of its great gateways. And the houses are almost all flat; they are large, severe, with iron bars over the lower windows; they have rarely a balcony or any exterior decoration. The houses of the Polentas or of the Traversal are only distinguished from the later buildings by a finer severity, by a few rigid cornices or lintels, and by a more heavily resistant way of leaning back from a base solidly planted in the earth. The very ruins, the ruins of the palace of Theodorie, for instance, form level lines

with the street, and bring no disturbing picturesqueness into the pattern. And, in all this, there is a form of charm as inherent as in the severe art of mosaic. In Ravenna mosaic obtains a quality hardly known elsewhere, a quality of softness, almost a diaphanous quality. The colors of mosaic in Venice are the colors of Venetian water, as it is stained by clouds and by the hard bright reflections of things: Venetian mosaic is water turned to stone. But in Ravenna its colors are those of the sky above them. I have seen, at sunset, a sky in which