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.

Sec. XV. And what effect has this splendor 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" for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and caricatures.
Round the whole square in front of the church there is almost a
continuous line of cafes, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes
lounge, and read empty journals; in its centre the Austrian bands play
during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the organ
notes,--the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen crowd
thickening round them,--a crowd, which, if it had its will, would
stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the
porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed
and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded
children,--every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation
and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing,--gamble,
and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised
centesimi upon the marble ledges of the church porch. And the images of
Christ and His angels look down upon it continually.

That we may not enter the church out of t