ht send his slim skiff to the bottom. In about a
quarter of an hour we turned out of the Grand Canal, and began threading
our way amid those innumerable narrow channels which traverse Venice in
all directions. Then it was that the dismal silence of the city fell
upon my heart. The canals we were now navigating were not over three
yards in width. They were long and gloomy; and tall, massive palaces,
sombre and spectral in the gloom, rose out of the sea on either hand.
There were columns at their entrances, with occasional pieces of
statuary, for which time had woven a garland of weeds. Their lower
windows were heavily grated; their marble steps were laved by the idle
tide; and their warehouse doors, through which had passed, in their
time, the merchandise of every clime, had long been unopened, and were
rotting from age. As we pursued our way, we passed under low-browed
arches, from which uncouth faces, cut in the stone, looked down upon us,
and grinned our welcome. The voice of man, the light of a candle, the
sound of a millstone, was not there. It seemed a city of the dead. The
inhabitants had lived and died ages ago, and had left their palaces to
be tenanted by the mermaids and spirits of the deep, for other occupants
I could see none. Spectral fancies began to haunt my imagination. I
conceived of the canal we were traversing as the Styx, our gondola as
the boat of Charon, and ourselves as a company of ghosts, who had passed
from earth, and were now on our silent way to the inexorable bar of
Rhadamanthus. A more spectral procession we could not have made, with
our spectral boat gliding noiselessly through the water, with its
spectral steersman, and its crowd of spectral passengers, though my
fancy, instead of being a fancy, had been a reality. All things around
me were sombre, shadowy, silent, as Hades itself.

Suddenly our gondola made a rapid sweep round a tall corner. Then it was
that the Queen of the Adriatic, in all her glory, burst upon us,--

"Looking a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers."

We were flung right in front of the great square of St. Mark. It was
like the instantaneous raising of the curtain from some glorious vision,
or like the sudden parting of the clouds around Mont Blanc; or, if I may
use such a simile, like the unfolding of the gates of a better world to
the spirit, after passing through the shadows of the tomb. The spacious
piazza, bounded on all sides wit