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 Camerlenghi;[136] 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,"[137]
struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty
cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the splash of the
water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's
side; and when at last that 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,[138] 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.

And although the last few eventful years, fraught with change to the
face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their influence on
Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the noble
landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only by a
glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and though
many of her palaces a