Page:Val d'Arno (Ruskin, 1890).djvu/242

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VAL D'ARNO.

tranquillity, "Cosmico," or the Equity of Kosmos, not by senseless attraction, but by spiritual thought and law. He stands pointing with his left hand to the earth, set only with tufts of grass; in his right hand he holds the ordered system of the universe—heaven and earth in one orb;—the heaven made cosmic by the courses of its stars; the earth cosmic by the seats of authority and fellowship,—castles on the hills and cities in the plain.

251. The tufts of grass under the feet of this figure will appear to you, at first, grotesquely formal. But they are only the simplest expression, in such herbage, of the subjection of all vegetative force to this law of order, equity, or symmetry, which, made by the Greek the principal method of his current vegetative sculpture, subdues it, in the hand of Cora or Triptolemus, into the merely triple sceptre, or animates it, in Florence, to the likeness of the Fleur-de-lys.

252. I have already stated to you that if any definite flower is meant by these triple groups of leaves, which take their authoritatively typical form in the crowns of the Cretan and Lacinian Hera, it is not the violet, but the purple iris; or sometimes, as in Pindar's