wny sails, which
are sometimes traversed by a large cross....

Below and beyond the Rialto are grouped on both banks the ancient
Fondaco dei Tedeschi, upon the colored walls of which, in uncertain
tints, may be devined some frescoes of Titian and Tintoretto, like
dreams which come only to vanish; the fish-market, the vegetable market,
and the old and new buildings of Scarpagnino and of Sansovino, almost
fallen in ruins, in which are installed various courts....

On the right rises the Palace della Ca d'Oro, one of the most charming
on the Grand Canal. It belongs to Mademoiselle Taglioni,[45] who has
restored it with most intelligent care. It is all embroidered, fringed,
carved in a Greek, Gothic, barbaric style, so fantastic, so light, so
aerial, that it might be fancied to have been built expressly for the
nest of a sylph. Mlle. Taglioni has pity for these poor, abandoned
palaces. She has several of them en pension, which she maintains out of
pure commiseration for their beauty; we were told of three or four upon
which she has bestowed this charity of repair....

In going to a distance from the heart of the city, life is extinct. Many
windows are closed or barred with boards; but this sadness has its
beauty; it is more perceptible to the soul than to the eyes, regaled
without cessation by the most unforeseen accidents of light and shade,
by buildings so varied that even their dilapidation only renders them
more picturesque, by the perpetual movement of the waters, and that blue
and rose tint which composes the atmosphere of Venice.

ST. MARK'S CHURCH[46]

BY JOHN RUSKIN

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