Po and the Brenta in a boat;
and, the days proving intolerably hot, we rested in the bordering palaces
during the day, travelling through the night, when darkness made the
bordering banks indistinct, and our solitude less remarkable; when the
wandering moon lit the waves that divided before our prow, and the
night-wind filled our sails, and the murmuring stream, waving trees, and
swelling canvass, accorded in harmonious strain. Clara, long overcome by
excessive grief, had to a great degree cast aside her timid, cold reserve,
and received our attentions with grateful tenderness. While Adrian with
poetic fervour discoursed of the glorious nations of the dead, of the
beauteous earth and the fate of man, she crept near him, drinking in his
speech with silent pleasure. We banished from our talk, and as much as
possible from our thoughts, the knowledge of our desolation. And it would
be incredible to an inhabitant of cities, to one among a busy throng, to
what extent we succeeded. It was as a man confined in a dungeon, whose
small and grated rift at first renders the doubtful light more sensibly
obscure, till, the visual orb having drunk in the beam, and adapted itself
to its scantiness, he finds that clear noon inhabits his cell. So we, a
simple triad on empty earth, were multiplied to each other, till we became
all in all. We stood like trees, whose roots are loosened by the wind,
which support one another, leaning and clinging with encreased fervour
while the wintry storms howl. Thus we floated down the widening stream of
the Po, sleeping when the cicale sang, awake with the stars. We entered the
narrower banks of the Brenta, and arrived at the shore of the Laguna at
sunrise on the sixth of September. The bright orb slowly rose from behind
its cupolas and towers, and shed its penetrating light upon the glassy
waters. Wrecks of gondolas, and some few uninjured ones, were strewed on
the beach at Fusina. We embarked in one of these for the widowed daughter
of ocean, who, abandoned and fallen, sat forlorn on her propping isles,
looking towards the far mountains of Greece. We rowed lightly over the
Laguna, and entered Canale Grande. The tide ebbed sullenly from out the
broken portals and violated halls of Venice: sea weed and sea monsters were
left on the blackened marble, while the salt ooze defaced the matchless
works of art that adorned their walls, and the sea gull flew out from the
shattered window. In the midst of this appa