278 ST. MARK’S REST

but my cup of cold water in the desert; and I speak only as an Arab, or an Indian,-with faint hope of ever seeing the ghost of Laughing Water.¹ A marvellous thing, nevertheless, I repeat,-this Protestant mind! Down in Brixton churchyard, all the fine people lie inside railings, and their relations expect the passers-by to acknowledge reverently who’s there:-nay, only last year, in my own Cathedral churchyard of Oxford, I saw the new grave of a young girl fenced about duly with carved stone, and overlaid with flowers;² and thought no shame to kneel for a minute or two at the foot of it,-though there were several good Protestant persons standing by.

But the old leaven is yet so strong in me that I am very shy of being caught by any of my country people kneeling near St. Mark’s grave.

“Because-you know-it’s all nonsense: it isn’t St. Mark’s-and never was,”-say my intellectual English knot of shocked friends.

I suppose one must allow much to modern English zeal for genuineness in all commercial articles. Be it so. Whether God ever gave the Venetians what they thought He had given, does not matter to us; He gave them at least joy and peace in their imagined treasure, more than we have in our real ones.

And He gave them the good heart to build this chapel over the cherished grave, and to write on the walls of it, St. Mark’s gospel, for all eyes,-and, so far as their power went, for all time.

90. But it was long before I learned to read that; and even when, with Lord Lindsay’s first help, I had begun spelling it out,-the old Protestant palsy still froze my heart, though my eyes were unsealed; and the preface to

¹ [See Part XIX. (“The Ghosts”) in The Song of Hiawatha, where the spirits of the departed appear to Minnehaha (“Laughing Water”) “from the land of the Hereafter.” For another reference to Longfellow’s poem, see Vol. IV. p. 355.]

² [The grave of Miss Edith Liddell, who died on June 26, 1876. A window at the east end of the south choir aisle enshrines her memory: see H. L. Thompson’s Henry George Liddell, 1899, p. 258.]

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