Page:Val d'Arno (Ruskin, 1890).djvu/39

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I.—NICHOLAS THE PISAN.
21

How do you think such a field becomes holy,—how separated, as the resting-place of loving kindred, from that other field of blood, bought to bury strangers in?

When you have finally succeeded, by your gospel of mammon, in making all the men of your own nation not only strangers to each other, but enemies; and when your every churchyard becomes therefore a field of the stranger, the kneeling hamlet will vainly drink the chalice of God in the midst of them. The field will be unholy. No cloisters of noble history can ever be built round such an one.

28. But the very earth of this at Pisa was holy, as you know. That "armata" of the Tuscan city brought home not only marble and ivory, for treasure; but earth,—a fleet's burden,—from the place where there was healing of soul's leprosy: and their field became a place of holy tombs, prepared for its office with earth from the land made holy by one tomb; which all the knighthood of Christendom had been pouring out its life to win.

29. I told you just now that this sculpture of Niccola's was the beginning of Christian architecture. How do you judge that Christian