Turn, on a sunny day, from the Molo towards San Marco, passing below the portico of the Ducal Palace adjoining the Piazzetta. Framed by the pointed arch at the end is a portion of the wall which once formed the west tower of the Ducal Palace. This delicate harmony of coloured marbles and sculptured stone seems a rare and beautiful creation, not of stone but of something more plastic, more mobile, so responsive is it to the light, so luminous, so full of feeling. As we draw nearer and it becomes more clearly defined, we see great slabs of marble sawn and spread open like the pages of a book, corresponding in pattern as the veining of a leaf. They are linked by marble rope-work, and between them are inserted smaller slabs of delicately sculptured stone and a wonderful coil of mosaic. It is a veritable patchwork wall, but no less beautiful in its effect of harmony than in its details--the four porphyry figures of embracing kings its corner-stone. This wall is truly a key to the fabric of the church itself; it is like a window into St. Mark’s, that treasury of Eastern spoil; the East is in every vein, in every heart-beat of it. The spoil of the temples of ancient gods furnished forth the Church of San Marco as it furnished the saint himself. In this one angle we have cipollino and porphyry, serpentine and verd-antico, marmo greco and eastern mosaic, pillars of granite profound and glittering, breccia africana and paonazetto. The weight of centuries is upon it all; ages of lives have gone to its making, and it came to Venice only when generations had passed over its head. For the human race it has never been but old; the mind loses itself in speculation on that stupendous past that lies between us and the time when stone was not. And yet how strangely through that long, enchanted silence, when the centuries were endowing it with an immensity of strength and hardness and endurance for which we have no word of parallel but in its own nature, it has kept the similitude and mobility of life, at once withholding and revealing the riches of its beauty. How can we wonder that da Contarini, the strange and learned dreamer of the Cinquecento, burst out into a rapture of mystic joy in the presence of San Marco, “that golden church, built by the eternal gods, of our protector, Messer San Marco”? He celebrates the pinnacles and shining columns, the throng of glittering figures that burn like golden spirits in the sunlight, the sculptured marbles polished with soft Ethiopian sand. “It might be said that it has been gathered together from all parts of the world.” He then proceeds to seek among the marbles of San Marco those mysterious correspondences which the wonder of men has always felt to exist between human nature and the nature of the stone; he loses himself in contemplation of one after another of the precious marbles that in wide surface or minute mosaic form the priceless garment of St. Mark’s temple: diaspro, which must be seen in