d 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"[155]--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 labours 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, 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 splendour 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"[156] for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and
caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the church there is
almost