the crusades crowded
tumultuously over its quays and many bridges. Its variety of industry,
and its commercial connections, turned that vast movement into another
source of wealth. It rose rapidly to that naval supremacy which
enabled it to capture piratical vessels and wealthy galleons, to seize
or sack Ionian cities, to storm Byzantium, and make the south of
Greece its suburb. Its manufactures were multiplied. Its dockyards
were thronged with busy workmen. Its palaces were crowded with
precious and famous works of art, while themselves marvels of beauty.
St. Mark's unfolded its magnificent loveliness above the great square.
In the palace adjoining was the seat of a dominion at the time
unsurpassed, and still brilliant in history; and it was in no fanciful
or exaggerated pride that the Doge was wont yearly, on Ascension Day,
to wed the Adriatic with a ring, as the bridegroom weds the bride.

Dreamlike as it seems, equally with Amsterdam, the larger and richer
"Venice of the North," it was erected by hardy hands. The various
works and arts of peace, with a prosperous commerce, were the real
piles, sunken beneath the flashing surface, on which church and
palace, piazza and arsenal, all arose. It was only when these unseen
supports secretly failed that advancement ceased, and the horses of
St. Mark at last were bridled. Not all the wars, with Genoa, Hungary,
with Western Europe, the Greek Empire, or the Ottoman--not earthquake,
plague, or conflagration, though by all it was smitten--overwhelmed
the city whose place in Europe had been so distinguished. The
decadence of enterprise, the growing discredit put upon industry, the
final discovery by Vasco da Gama of the passage around the Cape of
Good Hope, diverting traffic into new channels--these laid their
silent and tightening grasp on the power of Venice, till

"the salt sea-weed
Clung to the marble of her palaces,"

and the glory of the past was merged in a gloom which later centuries
have not lightened. There is a lesson and a promise in the fact.

New York itself may almost be said to have sprung from war; as the
vast excitements of the forty years' wrestle between Spain and its
revolted provinces gave incentive, at least, to the settlement of New
Netherland. But the city, since its real development was begun, has
been almost wholly built up by peace; and the swiftness of its
progress in our own time, which challenges parallel, shows wha