o address as of
one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred
and fifty years after Faliero's death; and the most conspicuous parts of
the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three
centuries that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned
from his tomb, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance
of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite
subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the water first narrows by
the steps of the Church of La Salute--the mighty doges would not know in
what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one
stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their
gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave.

The remains of _their_ Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses
which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a
grass-grown court and silent pathway and lightless canal, where the slow
waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must
soon prevail over them forever. It must be our task to glean and gather
them forth, and restore out of them some faint image of the lost city,
more gorgeous a thousandfold than that which now exists, yet not created
in the day-dream of the prince nor by the ostentation of the noble, but
built by iron hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity
of nature and the fury of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be
grasped by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank inquiry
into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene whose restless
tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the city, but
long denied her dominion.

When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no feature by
which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping loop
formed by the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the
great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain upon itself
causes a vast difference in the character of the distribution of its
_debris_ on its opposite sides. The rock fragments and sediment which
the torrents on the north side of the Alps bear into the plains are
distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here and there
lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm substrata to
appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which descend from the
southern side of the Hi