Val D'Arno by John Ruskin

249. Through all the tempestuous winter which during the period of history we have been reviewing, weakened, in their war with the opposed rocks of religious or knightly pride, the waves of the Tuscan Sea, there has been slow increase of the Favonian power which is to bring fruitfulness to the rock, peace to the wave. The new element which is introduced in the thirteenth century, and perfects for a little time the work of Christianity, at least in some few chosen souls, is the law of Order and Charity, of intellectual and moral virtue, which it now became the function of every great artist to teach, and of every true citizen to maintain.

250. I have placed on your table one of the earliest existing engravings by a Florentine hand, representing the conception which the national mind formed of this spirit of order and 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.