yes,
rising slowly from the sea, and strangely bringing to mind Tennyson's
description of the magic city of Camelot:

"Fairy Queens have built the city,
They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft
Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand;
And built it to the music of their harps."

Gradually the marble city took form, the slim towers and great domes
forming a lovely outline against the clear and cloudless beauty of the
evening sky.

CHAPTER XIX.

Arrival in Venice--The Water City--Gondola traffic--Past glories--Danieli's
Royal Hotel--St. Mark's Piazza--The Sacred Pigeons--St. Mark's--Mosaics--
The Holy Columns--Treasures--The Chian Steeds--The modern Goth.

Arriving at the station, our luggage was quickly carried to the
canal-side, where there were numbers of gondoliers awaiting us with
their hearse-like gondolas, which, as Byron describes in one of his
letters, "glide along the water, looking blackly just like a coffin
clapt in a canoe, where none can make out what you say or do." (There is
no name in either past or present times more sadly and inextricably
associated with Venice than that of George Gordon, Lord Byron.) It was
indeed a change from the usual noise and confusion at the end of a
railway journey, and it seemed strange not to see the usual array of
omnibuses. "The means of arrival in Venice, indeed, are commonplace
enough, but, lo! in a moment you step out of the commonplace railway
station into the lucid stillness of the water city--into poetry and
wonderland." The gondoliers are quite as clamorous as the liveried
omnibus legion. However, we soon found a representative of the Hotel
Danieli with a handsome gondola waiting to receive us. We stepped in
quickly, though most carefully--nay, even solemnly, and were soon
gliding over the silent water. There was a momentary tremor and
hesitation at first entering the long, slender, black craft with its
funeral-like hood or canopy; but the inside was luxuriously easy, and
the black cushions and drapery so comfortable that we speedily dismissed
our gloomy ideas, and began to enter into the busy moving scene around
us with the greatest delight and interest.

The gondolas were originally put into black by the order of the State,
as a rebuke to the lavish magnificence of the Venetians: they look now
as though they were in mourning for the past glories of the city. The
dress of the gondoliers was fortunate