figures indistinct among the gleaming of the
golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like
the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when
first its gates were angel-guarded long ago.

And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated
stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with
flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the
sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to kiss"--the shadow, as
it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation,
as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with
interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of
acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the
Cross; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain 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, mixed with white arches edged
with scarlet flowers--a confusion of delight, amid 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 coun