allow lakelets glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of
seaweed. In the midst of the largest of these, increased in importance
by the confluence of several large river channels towards one of the
openings in the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, on a
crowded cluster of islands; the various plots of higher ground which
appear to the north and south of this central cluster, have at
different periods been also thickly inhabited, and now bear, according
to their size, the remains of cities, villages, or isolated convents
and churches, scattered among spaces of open ground, partly waste and
encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the
metropolis.

The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet (varying
considerably with the seasons); but this fall, on so flat a shore, is
enough to cause continual movement in the waters, and in the main
canals to produce a reflux which frequently runs like a mill stream. At
high water no land is visible for many miles to the north or south of
Venice, except in the form of small islands crowned with towers or
gleaming with villages: there is a channel, some three miles wide,
between the city and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide
between it and the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which divides the
lagoon from the Adriatic, but which is so low as hardly to disturb the
impression of the city's having been built in the midst of the ocean,
although the secret of its true position is partly, yet not painfully,
betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deepwater channels,
which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs of huge
sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and crowded
waves that flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the uplifted
level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely different at low
tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty inches is enough to show ground over
the greater part of the lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is
seen standing in the midst of a dark plain of sea-weed, of gloomy
green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its
associated streams converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this
salt and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by
tortuous channels, seldom more than four or five feet deep, and often
so choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow the bottom till
their crossing tracks are seen through the clear