One lingers about the Cathedral a good deal, in Venice.  There is a strong fascination about it—­partly because it is so old, and partly because it is so ugly.  Too many of the world’s famous buildings fail of one chief virtue—­harmony; they are made up of a methodless mixture of the ugly and the beautiful; this is bad; it is confusing, it is unrestful.  One has a sense of uneasiness, of distress, without knowing why.  But one is calm before St. Mark’s, one is calm in the cellar; for its details are masterfully ugly, no misplaced and impertinent beauties are intruded anywhere; and the consequent result is a grand harmonious whole, of soothing, entrancing, tranquilizing, soul-satisfying ugliness.  One’s admiration of a perfect thing always grows, never declines; and this is the surest evidence to him that it is perfect.  St. Mark’s is perfect.  To me it soon grew to be so nobly, so augustly ugly, that it was difficult to stay away from it, even for a little while.  Every time its squat domes disappeared from my view, I had a despondent feeling; whenever they reappeared, I felt an honest rapture—­I have not known any happier hours than those I daily spent in front of Florian’s, looking across the Great Square at it.  Propped on its long row of low thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes, it seemed like a vast warty bug taking a meditative walk.

St. Mark’s is not the oldest building in the world, of course, but it seems the oldest, and looks the oldest—­especially inside.

When the ancient mosaics in its walls become damaged, they are repaired but not altered; the grotesque old pattern is preserved.  Antiquity has a charm of its own, and to smarten it up would only damage it.  One day I was sitting on a red marble bench in the vestibule looking up at an ancient piece of apprentice-work, in mosaic, illustrative of the command to “multiply and replenish the earth.”  The Cathedral itself had seemed very old; but this picture was illustrating a period in history which made the building seem young by comparison.  But I presently found an antique which was older than either the battered Cathedral or the date assigned to the piece of history; it was a spiral-shaped fossil as large as the crown of a hat; it was embedded in the marble bench, and had been sat upon by tourists until it was worn smooth.  Contrasted with the inconceivable antiquity of this modest fossil, those other things were flippantly modern—­jejune—­mere matters of day-before-yesterday.  The sense of the oldness of the Cathedral vanished away under the influence of this truly venerable presence.

St. Mark’s is monumental; it is an imperishable remembrancer of the profound and simply piety of the Middle Ages.  Whoever could ravish a column from a pagan temple, did it and contributed his swag to this Christian one.  So this fane is upheld by several hundred acquisitions procured in that peculiar way.  In our day it would be immoral to go on the highway to get bricks for a church, but it was no sin in the old times.  St. Mark’s was itself the victim of a curious robbery once.  The thing is set down in the history of Venice, but it might be smuggled into the Arabian Nights and not seem out of place there: