[8] "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella."

[9] "Agnosco veteris vestigia ammae."

[10] "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori,
Dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere."

[11] "Nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae."

TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.

I.

VENICE AND ROME.

It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's
first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great
city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted
here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of
trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose
boatmen bandy _lazzi_ and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a
lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of
brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against
the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with
which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred
with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and
bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world
seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those
patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water,
from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And yet really to understand
the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which
the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was from
the vast Alpine chain which hangs in the haze of midday like a long dim
cloud-line to the north that the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the
Roman world. Their path lay, along the coast trending round to the west,
where lost among little villages that stand out white in the distant
shadow lie the sites of Heraclea and Altinum. Across these grey shallows
cut by the blue serpentine windings of deeper channels the Romans of the
older province of Venetia on the mainland fled before Attila or
Theodoric or Alboin to found the new Venetia of the lagoon. Eastward
over Lido the glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of the
Pirate war, that, struggle for life which shaped into their after-form
the government and destinies of the infant state. Venice itself, the
crown and end of struggle and of flight, lies over shining miles of
water to the south. But it is here that one can best study the story of
its birth; it is easier to realize th