e last hill he had surmounted,
the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered
among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for
turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time,
the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in
the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to be
anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive
halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder,
there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly
cherished by the traveller than that which brought 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 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-colored 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,