The Church of St. Mark, standing so
solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pillars,
is not in the least gray with time--no grayer than a Greek lyric.
"All has suffered a sea-change
Into something rich and strange,"
in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its
baptism in the sea.
And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes for a little while
forget how marvelous she is, at any moment you may be startled into vivid
remembrance. The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and step by
step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads high up
to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine green and
purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching their heads
to look into the lofty windows,--blind long ago to their leafy
tenderness,--while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well, with the
beauty of the sculptor's soul wrought forever into the stone. Or Venice
lures you in a gondola into one of her remote canals, where you glide
through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under our work-day
world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates of the palaces
stare at you in austere surprise, where the innumerable balconies are full
of the Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames, gossiping and making
love to one another, from their airy perches.
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