of language and of life--angels, and the signs of
heaven, and the labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the
earth; and above these another range of glittering pinnacles, mixt
with white arches edged with scarlet flowers--a confusion of delight,
amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their
breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted on a blue
field covered with stars: until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests
of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into
the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the
breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and
the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst.

Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval!
There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for instead
of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the
bleak upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle
among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their
living plumes, changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less
lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years.

And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath it? You
may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of St.
Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance
brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and
poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of the
porches, the meanest tradesmen of the city push their counters; nay,
the foundations of its pillars are themselves the seats, not "of them
that sell doves" for sacrifice, but of the venders of toys and
caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the church there is
almost a continuous line of cafes, where the idle Venetians of the
middle classes lounge and read empty journals; in its center the
Austrian bands play during the time of vespers their martial music
jarring with the organ notes--the march drowning the miserere and the
sullen crowd thickening round them--a crowd which if it had its will
would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of
the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes,
unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and
unregarded children--every heavy glance of their young eyes full of
desperation and stony depravity and thei