414 ST. MARK’S, VENICE

guide-book’s passing assertion of date-this century or the other-can in the least make him even conceive, and far less feel, that he is actually standing before the very shafts and stones that were set on their foundations here while Harold the Saxon stood by the grave of the Confessor under the fresh-raised vaults of the first Norman Westminster Abbey, of which now a single arch only remains standing. He cannot, by any effort, imagine that those exquisite and lace-like sculptures of twined acanthus,-every leaf-edge as sharp and fine as if they were green weeds fresh springing in the dew, by the Pan-droseion,-were, indeed, cut and finished to their perfect grace while the Norman axes were hewing out rough zigzags and dentils round the aisles of Durham and Lindisfarne. Or nearer, in what is left of our own Canterbury-it is but an hour’s journey in pleasant Kent-you may compare, almost as if you looked from one to the other, the grim grotesque of the block capitals in the crypt with the foliage of these flexile ones, and with their marble doves-scarcely distinguishable from the living birds that nestle between them. Or, going down two centuries (for the fillings of the portico arches were not completed till after 1204), what thirteenth-century work among our grey limestone walls can be though of as wrought in the same hour with that wreath of intertwined white marble, relieved by gold, of which the tenderest and sharpest lines of the pencil cannot finely enough express the surfaces and undulations? For indeed, without and within, St. Mark’s is not, in the real nature of it, a piece of architecture, but a jewelled casket and painted reliquary, chief of the treasures in what were once the world’s treasuries of sacred things, the kingdoms of Christendom.

A jewelled casket, every jewel of which was itself sacred. Not a slab of it, nor a shaft, but has been brought from the churches descendants of the great Seven of Asia, or from the Christian-Greek of Corinth, Crete, and Thrace, or the Christian-Israelite in Palestine-the central archivolt

[Version 0.04: March 2008]