IV. ST. MARK’S 83

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. And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, “their bluest veins to kiss”¹-the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with 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 labours 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 horses² 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.³

¹ [Antony and Cleopatra, Act ii. sc. 5.]

² [The Bronze Horses, formerly gilt, which stand over the central porch of the west front, were sent from the Hippodrome at Constantinople in 1204 by the Doge Enrico Dandolo, as part of the plunder when that city was taken in the Fourth Crusade. Napoleon removed them to Paris in 1797 and they adorned the Triumphal Arch in the Place du Carousel, but they were restored to Venice in 1815. Goethe was enthusiastic in their praise, and Rogers speaks of them as

“the four steeds divine

That strike the ground, resounding with their feet,

And from their nostrils snort ethereal flame.”

Modern archæologists are divided in opinion as to their workmanship. Some consider them to be Greek work of the school of Lysippus; others, to be Roman, of the time of Nero; another conjecture is that Augustus brought them from Alexandria, after his victory over Mark Antony. They are supposed to have been attached to a chariot and to have been placed by successive Roman emperors on their triumphal arches. For other references to them, see St. Mark’s Rest, § 99, and Ariadne Florentina, § 213.]

³ [In his Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy at Venice (1877) Ruskin

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