broad extent to realise its strange radiance, like flocks of cloudlets fleeting before the wind in the full illumination of the setting sun, dazzling our eyes with light; or that other adamantine marble of Africa, the breccia adriana di Tegoli, a harmony of greens before which serpentine and verd-antico must bow; or the most precious porpora of deep and glowing red; or that queen of all the stones, imperial in its beauty, a magnetic stone indeed, drawing the spirit into its luminous depths, weaving round it an enchanted web of secrecy, of divine inter-relations, till the human soul seems to commune with the very soul of colour--_diaspro sanguinoso_. What would not Sir Thomas Browne have read in those eloquent and secret pages where wave follows wave of colour, deep ocean green, pure carmine, translucent amethyst. Diaspro sanguinoso! in the setting of a ring, in the mosaic of a pavement, it is seen a dense green stone spotted with crimson--bloodstone. It is as if you saw the human eye in one of those weird, symbolic paintings of old time, isolated in its socket without the illumination of the human countenance about it. This sanguinary jasper is too subtle, too delicate, too mystical to belong to that titanic family of the stones of Africa. The dreaming soil of Egypt might have given it birth; it might own kinship with the myth of Aurora’s kiss; but to us it seems fraught with the magic of a more distant East. There have been many vindicators of the freedom of Venice; many assertors that, though in appearance subject some time to Byzantium, she has always been politically independent. To us it seems a matter of lesser moment; but whether, in fact or in form, Venice were or were not ever politically dependent on Byzantium, the fact of her artistic dependence is one which she cannot deny without perjuring herself before a thousand witnesses. Document after document more durable than parchment--though many have already perished and many perish daily--attests the debt of Venice to the East. Till she perish altogether at the hands of a relentless, unregarding tyrant--a bastard child of Time misnamed Progress--she must continue to bear witness to her debt. So long as she breathes, each breath confesses it and the East will lay her tribute on the tomb of Venice dead--lamenting as for one of her own children. Chapter Seven TWO VENETIAN STATUES