And round the walls of the porches there are
set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green
serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse
and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to
kiss"[155]--the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line
after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved
sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of
herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs,
all beginning and ending in the Cross; and above them, in the broad
archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life--angels, and the
signs of heaven, and the labours of men, each in its appointed season
upon the earth; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles,
mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers,--a confusion of
delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing
in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted on
a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the
crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far
into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the
breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and
the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst.
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