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 in an endless network
of buds and plumes; and in the midst of it the solemn forms of angels,
sceptred 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."

This description of the great art-master, I of course accepted as from a
highly cultured aesthetic source; but fear that, from want of true poetic
light and art culture, I did not quite appreciate or realize it in the
interior, though to me the exterior outline and architecture were always
soft and beautiful. Unfortunately, one is greatly pestered outside by a
voracious band of touts, miscalled guides, some of them mere
uneducated-looking, parrot-like roughs, and whom it is laughable to
suppose could have any pretensions to refined knowledge and art
history--irreverent monsters who have no sympathy with, or appreciation
of, anything, except what you may have in your pockets.

The interior of St Mark's reminded me more of an Eastern mosque than a
Christian temple, with its heavy arches, arcades, galleries, colonnades,
and Protean gloom. "A grave and dreamy structure," says Dickens, "of
immense proportions; golden with old mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim
with the smoke of incense; costly in treasures of precious stones and
metals, glittering through iron bars; holy with the bodies of deceased
saints; rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass; dark with carved
woods and coloured marbles; obscure in its vast heights and lengthened
distances; shining with silver lamps and winking lights; unreal,
fantastic, solemn, inconceivable throughout."

When the eyes have grown accustomed to the darkness, the soft rainbow
colours of the mosaics come stealing out to view one by one. Nearly the
whole of the interior, more especially the vaulting, is beautified by
these millions upon millions of tiny cubes of coloured and gilded glass,
arranged with infinite labour and skill, and wonderfully illustrating
the most beautiful and impressive parts of Holy Writ, with reference to
the history of mankind, from the creation. To blen