333

" 20. Wall Veil Decoration, Ca' Trevisan, 369

" 21. Wall Veil Decoration, San Michele, Lucca, 378

THE STONES OF VENICE.

CHAPTER I.

THE QUARRY.

Sec. I. Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean,
three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands:
the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great
powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third,
which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led
through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.

The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded
for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets
of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a
lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning: for
the very depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we
forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and
the sea, that they were once "as in Eden, the garden of God."

Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in
endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final
period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak--so
quiet,--so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt,
as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which
was the City, and which the Shadow.

I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever
lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to
be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like
passing bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.

Sec. II. It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which
might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange
and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless
chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,--barred with
brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the
surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which
we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their
results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear
upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind than that
usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may, per