asleep in a glittering sepulchre, the living light rose upon both
horizons, and the fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were shaken over
its golden paralysis.

SECTION XXIV. The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system
to the enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the
Arab was to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of
worship. The Lombard covered every church which he built with the
sculptured representations of bodily exercises--hunting and war.
[Footnote: Appendix 8, "The Northern Energy."] The Arab banished all
imagination of creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from their
minarets, "There is no god but God." Opposite in their character and
mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they came from the
North, and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava stream: they
met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and the very
centre of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead water of
the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck,
is VENICE.

The Ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal
proportions--the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of
the world.

SECTION XXV. The reader will now begin to understand something of the
importance of the study of the edifices of a city which includes, within
the circuit of some seven or eight miles, the field of contest between
the three pre-eminent architectures of the world:--each architecture
expressing a condition of religion; each an erroneous condition, yet
necessary to the correction of the others, and corrected by them.