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 of
language and of life--angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labors of
men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above these,
another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged
with scarlet flowers,--a confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts
of the Greek horses 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.

SECTION 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