balanced on the bright mirage of the Lagoon; two or three smooth surges
of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond
these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the
Alps girded the whole horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here
and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow,
into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred
clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian
Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the
nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where
it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the
gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls were
reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not
through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two
rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveller's sight
opened the long ranges of columned palaces--each with its black boat
moored at the portal--each with its image cast down, beneath its feet,
upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of
rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the
shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the
palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so
adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent;
when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the
gondolier's cry, "Ah! Stali," struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow
turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow
canal, where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing
along the marble by the boat's side; and when at last that boat darted
forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the
Ducal Palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome
of Our Lady of Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should be so
deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so
strange as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being.

Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the
rod of the enchanter than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters
which encircled her