We are in a low vaulted room; vaulted not with arches, but with small cupolas starred with gold and checkered with gloomy figures: in the center is a bronze font charged with rich bas-reliefs; a small figure of the Baptist standing above it in a single ray of light, that glances across the narrow room, dying as it falls from a window high in the wall--and the first thing that it strikes, and the only thing that it strikes brightly, is a tomb. We hardly know if it be a tomb indeed: for it is like a narrow couch set beside the window, low-roofed and curtained; so that it might seem, but that it has some height above the pavement, to have been drawn toward the window, that the sleeper might be wakened early--only there are two angels who have drawn the curtain back, and are looking down upon him. Let us look also and thank that gentle light that rests upon his forehead forever, and dies away upon his breast. The face is of a man in middle life, but there are two deep furrows right across the forehead, dividing it like the foundations of a tower; the height of it above is bound by the fillet of the ducal cap. The rest of the features are singularly small and delicate, the lips sharp--perhaps the sharpness of death being added to that of the natural lines; but there is a sweet smile upon them, and a deep serenity upon the whole countenance. The roof of the canopy above has been blue, filled with stars; beneath, in the center of the tomb on which the figure rests, is a seated figure of the Virgin, and the border of it all around is of flowers and soft leaves, growing rich and deep as if in a field in summer. It is the Doge Andrea Dandolo; a man early great among the great of Venice, and early lost. She chose him for her king in his thirty-sixth year; he died ten years later, leaving behind him that history to which we owe half of what we know of her former fortunes. Look round at the room in which he lies. The floor of it is of rich mosaic, encompassed by a low seat of red marble; and its walls are of alabaster, but worn and shattered and darkly stained with age, almost a ruin--in places the slabs of marble have fallen away altogether, and the rugged brickwork is seen through the rents: but all beautiful--the ravaging fissures fretting their way among the islands and channeled zones of the alabaster and the time stains on its translucent masses darkened into fields of rich golden brown, like the color of seaweed when the sun strikes on it through deep sea....