ed all imagination of creature form from his temples, and
proclaimed from their minarets "There is no god but God." Opposite in
their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy,
they came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and
the lava stream; they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman
empire; and the very center of the struggle, the point of pause of
both, the dead water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed
fragments of the Roman wreck, is Venice.

The ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly
equal proportions--the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central
building of the world.

II

ST. MARK'S AT VENICE[39]

Beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the
earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind
of awe, that we may see it far away; a multitude of pillars and white
domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of colored light; a treasure
heap, it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl,
hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair
mosaic and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and
delicate as ivory--sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm-leaves
and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and
fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless
network of buds and plumes; and in the midst of it the solemn forms of
angels, sceptered, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other
across the gates, their 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.

[Footnote 39: From "The Stones of Venice," Vol. II.]

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