r and dance
before the strong winds upon the unlifted level of the shallow sea.

But the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or
twenty inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the
Lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst
of a dark plain of sea-weed, of gloomy green, except only where the
larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams converge toward
the port of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and
the fishing-boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom more than four or
five feet deep, and often so choked with slime that the heavier keels
furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks are seen through the clear
sea-water like the ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves blue
gashes upon the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick
weed that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves, leaning
to and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted tide.

The scene is often profoundly oppressive, even at this day, when every
plot of higher ground bears some fragment of fair building: but, in
order to know what it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at
evening the windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of
the melancholy plain; let him remove, in his imagination, the brightness
of the great city that still extends itself in the distance, and the
walls and towers from the islands that are near; and so wait, until the
bright investiture and sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the
waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness
beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor
and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the
tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a
questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the
horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for
his habitation.

They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and
strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be
the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the
great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be
remembered what strange preparation had been made for the things which
no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole existence
and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or co