ts accursed depth. To-day it looks not only innocent, but
gloriously bright.

"I was out in the Lagoons this evening, for the purpose of visiting
by twilight that solitary Isle of St Clements, where Monks exchange
the voluntary seclusion for penal dungeons, (l'un vaut bien
l'autre!) the sky glowing with its last light, lingered over its
tall belfry and few old trees, and a sea as smooth as a crystal
pavement slept at the base of its grim walls, all in vain;
Campanile, Convent, Grove, and that pyramidal Powder Magazine,
looked obdurately sullen enough to tell their own uses, had I not
known their chronicle."

THE SMALL CANALS.

"I thence directed my gondolier to row under the Bridge of Sighs,
through the intricacies of the interior canals; and if ever a man
wished to be fed to the full with solemn, ay, appalling gloom, he
may be gratified by following my example. From the weltering
surface of a labyrinth of channels, let him look up till it wearies
him, to the awful roofs of the mansions, whose walls of
immeasurable height, and scarfed with black masses of shadow and
glaring moonlight, seem to close over his head and to barricade his
path, as they interlace and confound each other in endless
circuits; and he will have quite enough to kindle the torch of his
darker imagination, even if he did not know those tremendous gulfs
of masonry to be Venice, and those heart-sinking portals and
windows of barbaric sculpture, the homes of her inexorable
oligarchy. Yes, you may anticipate Naples, you may picture to
yourself Rome, and Florence may have fulfilled much of your
previous fancies; but no conception can prepare you for Venice.

"What enchantment lingers still about every stone of this mourning
city! My affection for her dismantled palaces is almost morbid.

'Like an unrighteous and an unburied ghost,'

do I nightly haunt that Tartarus of antique masonry, the interior
canals of Venice, uniformly entering or departing from them by the
Bridge of Sighs. To me their hideous height, their appalling gloom,
(for the meridian cannot touch their waters, and the moon glides
like a spectre over their huge parapets,) their bewildering
intricacies, their joyless weltering floods, the countless bridges,
each with its sculptured monster-heads yawning a