'
"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 followed close and
loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and when at
last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across
which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine
veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was
no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the
visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to
forget the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well
might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to
the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the
waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her
state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all
which in Nature was wild or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as
the waves and tempests--had been won to adorn her instead of to
destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty
which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the
hour-glass as well as of the sea.
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