him within sight of
Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of
Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its
buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other great
towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance,
and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers
out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible
that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of
the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling
lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets
bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds,
the masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in
knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all
proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city
rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the
Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa,
but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued
into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a
field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of
the lonely island church, fitly named "St. George of the Seaweed." As
the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had
just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted
irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its
northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple
pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three
smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots,
and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the
chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north--a wall of
jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of
misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and
itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite
upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up
behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the
crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them,
to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the
great city, where it