164 GUIDE TO THE ACADEMY AT VENICE

bathing machines and painless pills. Here are purer baths and medicines told of; here have been more ingenious engineers. From the Sinai desert, from the Sion rock, from the defiles of Lebanon, met here the ghosts of ancient builders to oversee the work,-of dead nations, to inspire it: Bezaleel and the maids of Israel who gave him their jewels; Hiram and his forgers in the vale of Siddim-his woodmen of the Syrian forests;-David the lord of war, and his Son the Lord of Peace, and the multitudes that kept holyday when the cloud filled the house they had built for the Lord of All;¹-these, in their myriads stood by, to watch, to guide;-it might have been, had Venice willed, to bless.

Literally so, mind you. The wreathen work of the lily capitals and their archivolts, the glass that keeps unfaded their colour-the design of that colour itself, and the stories that are told in the glow of it,-all these were brought by the Jew or the Tyrian, bringing also the treasures of Persia and Egypt; and with these, labouring beside them as one brought up with them, stood the Athena of Corinth, and the Sophia of Byzantium.

Not in vicious luxury these, yet-though in Tyrian splendour glows St. Mark’s;-nor those quiet and trim little houses on the right, joining the Campanile. You are standing (the work is so completely done that you may soon fancy yourself so) in old St. Mark’s Place, at the far end of it, before it was enlarged; you may find the stone marking the whole length of it in the pavement,

¹ [The Bible references here are Exodus xxxvi. 1 (“Then wrought Bezaleel,” etc.; compare Vol. XXIII. p. 266), xxxv. 22 (“And they came, both men and women, as many as were willing-hearted, and brought bracelets,” etc.); 2 Samuel v. 11 (“And Hiram King of Tyre sent messengers to David, and cedar trees, and carpenters, and masons; and they built David an house”), and 1 Kings v.; 1 Kings vii. 13, 14 (“And King Solomon sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre ... and he was cunning to work all works of brass”); Genesis xiv. 10 (“And the vale of Siddim was full of slime pits”): the “Vale of Siddim” appears to have been the plains around the Dead Sea, which were afterwards submerged; these plains were the earliest home of the Tyrians (see Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine, pp. 287-288); Psalms xlii. 4 (“with a multitude that kept holy day”; compare Vol. XX. p. 94); 1 Kings viii. 10 (“When the priests were come out of the holy place, the cloud filled the house of the Lord”).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]