"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 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.
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