re are still places where some
evidence of vitality remains, and where, with kind closing of the eyes
to signs, too manifest even there, of distress and declining fortune,
the stranger may succeed in imagining, for a little while, what must
have been the aspect of Venice in her prime. But this lingering
pulsation has not force enough any more to penetrate into the suburbs
and outskirts of the city; the frost of death has there seized upon it
irrevocably, and the grasp of mortal disease is marked daily by the
increasing breadth of its belt of ruin. Nowhere is this seen more
grievously than along the great north-eastern boundary, once occupied by
the smaller palaces of the Venetians, built for pleasure or repose; the
nobler piles along the grand canal being reserved for the pomp and
business of daily life. To such smaller palaces some garden ground was
commonly attached, opening to the water-side; and, in front of these
villas and gardens, the lagoon was wont to be covered in the evening by
gondolas: the space of it between this part of the city and the island
group of Murano being to Venice, in her time of power, what its parks
are to London; only gondolas were used instead of carriages, and the
crowd of the population did not come out till towards sunset, and
prolonged their pleasures far into the night, company answering to
company with alternate singing.

Sec. II. If, knowing this custom of the Venetians, and with a vision in
his mind of summer palaces lining the shore, and myrtle gardens sloping
to the sea, the traveller now seeks this suburb of Venice, he will be
strangely and sadly surprised to find a new but perfectly desolate quay,
about a mile in length, extending from the arsenal to the Sacca della
Misericordia, in front of a line of miserable houses built in the course
of the last sixty or eighty years, yet already tottering to their ruin;
and not less to find that the principal object in the view which these
houses (built partly in front and partly on the ruins of the ancient
palaces) now command is a dead brick wall, about a quarter of a mile
across the water, interrupted only by a kind of white lodge, the
cheerfulness of which prospect is not enhanced by his finding that this
wall encloses the principal public cemetery of Venice. He may, perhaps,
marvel for a few moments at the singular taste of the old Venetians in
taking their pleasure under a churchyard wall: but, on further inquiry,
he will find that th