had been chosen for the mirror of her state rather
than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in nature was wild
or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests--had
been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for
ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the
sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea.

And although the last few eventful years, fraught with change to the
face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their influence on
Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the noble
landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only by a
glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and though
many of her palaces are forever defaced and many in desecrated ruins,
there is still so much of magic in her aspect that the hurried
traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has
been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin
and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at least, are
little to be envied in whose hearts the great charities of the
imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the
importunity of painful impressions or to raise what is ignoble and
disguise what is discordant in a scene so rich in its remembrances, so
surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the imagination there
must be no permission during the task which is before us.

The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this
century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those mightier
ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and they must be
torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they
stood in their own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they
are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of
discerning, the objects to which they ought to have been attached. The
Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere
efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight
must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering,
or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs,"
which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of
Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with
breathless interest: the statue which Byron makes Falier