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 Sea-weed.'

"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 Argua
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 magnified itself along the waves, as
the quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.

"And at last when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its
untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded
rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the
Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long
ranges of columned palaces--each with its black boat moored at the
portal, each with its image cast down beneath its feet upon that
green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich
tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the
shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind
the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so
adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just
bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen,
the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the ear, and
the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over
the narrow canal, where the plash of the water fol