I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, which record the scenery of his own soul during the delirium of a fever.  Some of them (described only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome.  Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase, and upon it, groping his way upward, was Piranesi himself.  Follow the stairs a little farther and you perceive it to come to a sudden, abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onward to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below.  Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi?  You suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here.  But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss.  Again elevate your eyes, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi on his aspiring labours, and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.”

This plate was evidently one of the Carceri set—­sixteen in all—­which the etcher improvised after some severe cerebral malady.  What would we not give to have heard the poet of Kubla Khan describing the fantastic visions of the Venetian artist to the English opium eater!  The eloquence of the prose passage we have transcribed has in it some faint echoes of Coleridge’s golden rumble.  That these two men appreciated the Italian is something; perhaps they saw chiefly in his work its fantastic side.  There was no saner craftsman than Piranesi apart from certain of his plates; no more solid construction in a print can be shown than his various interpretations of the classic ruins of Rome, the temples at Paestum.  He was a great engraver and etcher whose passion was the antique.  He deliberately withdrew from all commerce with the ideas and art of his own times.  He loved architecture for architecture’s sake; not as a decoration, not as a background for humanity, but as something personal.  It was for him what the human face was for Rembrandt and Velasquez.  That he was called the Rembrandt of Architecture is but another testimony to the impression he made upon his contemporaries, though the title is an unhappy one.  Piranesi even in his own little fenced-off coign of art is not comparable to the etcher of the Hundred Guilder print, nor are there close analogies in their respective handling of darks and lights.