tly element that moaned and
shuddered under the Gondola, as if remorseful for its own
involuntary cruelties, was to spread its weltering pall over his
hearseless bones."

THE BELLS OF VENICE.

"The islands constituting the Venetian Archipelago are about fifty
in number, of various size and extremely picturesque. They were
each of them the seat of a monastery or nunnery, till Napoleon
came, who overthrew these saintly receptacles, converting them into
forts, mills, public gardens, &c. In short, these islands are among
the most beautiful contingents of this magic scene. Each has its
graceful campanile, and its various structures of castle, convent,
mill, or summer-house; each its due girdle of blue sea, fenced by
walls that rise round its margent, and embroidered with groves and
arbours of the most delightful green.

"This evening I cruised past many of them in my gondola after
sunset; and was particularly struck with the beauty of the large
Isle of Murano, and its attendant San Michaele (the latter one
entire cemetery,) whose thin tall campaniles throw up their slender
figures in fine relief against the long wavy purple of the
Acharnean Hills in the west, at the head of the Adriatic.

"Night gathered round, as we floated under that prodigious monument
of the departed majesty of the Republic, the arsenal, whose
ramparts high and endless, and as ugly as either, lay weltering
many a rood upon their wooden piles. Every bell in the city was
tolling for Nones, and sang aloud to the surrounding islands, whose
campaniles replied with sympathetic thunder, a solemn diapason of
Corybantine brass, to my taste, wonderfully in unison with the
funeral mole of the defunct Arsenal, the repose of the purple
mountains, and the fainting splendour of that twinned vault and
pavement, the opal sea and sky, smooth, soft, and bright enough for
Juno and Amphitrite to hold a gossip, each from her own imperial
element.

"Probably it is to the peculiarity of its situation, that one may
attribute the sweetly solemn melodies produced by the bells of
Venice. Flinging their prolonged notes down those immense hollows
of architecture, sweeping round their narrow streets, and floating
over their liquid pavement, they derive every advantage from that
element which alw