sea water like the
ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves blue gashes upon the ground
at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick weed that fringes the
banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning to and fro upon the
uncertain sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is often profoundly
oppressive, even at this day, when every plot of higher ground bears
some fragment of fair building: but, in order to know what it was once,
let the traveller follow in his boat at evening the windings of some
unfrequented channel far into the midst of the melancholy plain; let
him remove, in his imagination, the brightness of the great city that
still extends itself in the distance, and the walls and towers from the
islands that are near; and so wait, until the bright investiture and
sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the waters, and the black
desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night,
pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful
silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools,
or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning cry; and he
will be enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart with
which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation.
They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and
strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be
the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the
great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be
remembered what strange preparation had been made for the things which
no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole existence
and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or compelled, by
the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the sea. Had
deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and
again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges
beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of the Venetian
architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an
ordinary sea-port. Had there been no tide, as in other parts of the
Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome,
and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only
a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water-access to the
doors of the palaces would have been impossible: even as it is, there
is sometim