as 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,"[1] 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,[2] 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 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.

Sec. II. 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 for ever 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