more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate survey of
the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the
happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last
hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village,
where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its
valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty
perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers
of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful
and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the
railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to
be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
successive halting place than a new arrangement of glass roofing
and iron girder--there were few moments of which the recollection
was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which, as I
endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought
him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open
lagoon from the canal of Mestre.

"Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this
direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of
the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly
disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange
rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of
the deep sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could
at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water
which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north
and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the
east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of
black weed separating and disappearing gradually in knots of
heaving shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed
it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so
calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the
Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of
Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of northern waves, yet
subdued into a strange spacious rest,