The other view in Venice which seems to combine best its peculiar character with its picturesque beauty may be obtained at a very short distance from St. Mark's. Leave the façade of which we have just spoken, the three great masts, with their richly ornamented sockets of bronze, from which, in the proud days of Venice, floated the banners of Candia, Cyprus, and the Morea; turn from the Piazza into the Piazzetta; leave on the one hand the huge Campanile, more huge than beautiful (if one may venture to whisper a criticism), on the other the sumptuous portico of the Ducal Palace; pass on beneath the imposing façade of the palace itself, with its grand colonnade; on between the famous columns, brought more than seven centuries since from some Syrian ruins, which bear the lion of St. Mark and the statue of St. Theodore, the other patron of the Republic; and then, standing on the Molo at the head of the Riva degli Schiavoni, look around; or better still, step down into one of the gondolas which are in waiting at the steps, and push off a few dozen yards from the land: then look back on the façade of the Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, along the busy quays of the Riva, towards the green trees of the Giardini Publici, look up the Piazzetta, between the twin columns, to the glimpses of St. Mark's and the towering height of the Campanile, along the façade of the Royal Palace, with the fringe of shrubbery below contrasting pleasantly with all these masses of masonry, up the broad entrance to the Grand Canal, between its rows of palaces, across it to the great dome of Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana della Mare, with its statue of Fortune (appropriate to the past rather than to the present) gazing out from its seaward angle. Beyond this, yet farther away, lies the Isola San Giorgio, a group of plain buildings only, a church, with a dome simple in outline and a brick campanile almost without adornment, yet the one thing in Venice, after the great group of St. Mark; this is a silent witness to its triumphs in presses itself on the mind. From this point of view Venice rises before our eyes in its grandeur and in its simplicity, in its patrician and its plebeian aspects, as "a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean, throned on her hundred isles ... a ruler of the waters and their powers." [Illustration]