sh into words that
reproduced their forms and colors:

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once
shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked FACCHINI; and now in
St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear; and
I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a
struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But the snow continued to
fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil
and encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when
the most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The lofty
crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and
I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked
at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's Church was
perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snowfall
were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around the structure that
always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be
anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated
the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains
and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the
builder--or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There
was marvelous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches
of the facade, and all that gracious harmony into which the temple
rises, or marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the
statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherealized by the purity
and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden
gloves that tremble like peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and
plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it
danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty--beauty
which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such evanescent
loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole life, and with
despair to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be
fairly reflected in picture or poem.

Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the
granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is,
and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so
gentle and mild he looked by the tender light of the storm. The towers
of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the
sail