straight walk to the west front, and there stand for a time, looking up
at its deep-pointed porches and the dark places between their pillars
where there were statues once, and where the fragments, here and there,
of a stately figure are still left, which has in it the likeness of a
king, perhaps indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king long ago
in heaven; and so higher and higher up to the great mouldering wall of
rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered, and grey, and grisly
with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling
winds into yet unseemlier shape, and coloured on their stony scales by
the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still,
to the bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the
bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only
sees like a drift of eddying black points, now closing, now scattering,
and now settling suddenly into invisible places among the bosses and
flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill the whole square with
that strange clangour of theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing, like the
cries of birds on a solitary coast between the cliffs and sea.

Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of all its
small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its
secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense
and steady performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by
the cathedral clock; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on
all who have passed through the lonely square at their feet for
centuries, and on all who have seen them rising far away over the
wooded plain, or catching on their square masses the last rays of the
sunset, when the city at their feet was indicated only by the mist at
the bend of the river. And then let us quickly recollect that we are in
Venice, and land at the extremity of the Calla Lunga San Moise, which
may be considered as there answering to the secluded street that led us
to our English cathedral gateway.

We find ourselves in a paved alley, some seven feet wide where it is
widest, full of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant
salesmen,--a shriek in their beginning, and dying away into a kind of
brazen ringing, all the worse for its confinement between the high
houses of the passage along which we have to make our way. Over-head,
an inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies and
c