Part 6

As he sang, he smiled and nodded to the others around him; and they sang in chorus, about kissing and loving while the heart was young. It was a merry song, very merry; and yet it sounded like a magical song of death in my heart.... My heart desired love: God had ordained it, who had implanted this feeling within me. I was still young, however: Venice was a gay city full of beautiful women. And what does the world give me for my virtue, thought I, for my childlike temper? Ridicule, and time brings bitterness and grey hairs. Thus thought I, and sang in chorus with the rest, of kissing and loving, while the heart was yet young....

The vessel flew onward to the north--to the rich Venice. In the morning hour, I discerned the white buildings and town of Venice, which seemed like a crowd of ships with outspread sails. To the left stretched itself the kingdom of Lombardy, with its flat coast: the Alps seemed like pale blue mist in the horizon. Here was the heaven wide. Here the half of the hemisphere could mirror itself in the heart.

In this sweet morning air ... I thought about the history of Venice, of the city’s wealth and pomp, its independence and supremacy; of the magnificent doges, and their marriage with the sea. We advanced nearer and nearer to the sea: I could already distinguish the individual houses across the lagoons.... The sun shone upon Venice: all the bells were ringing. I stepped down into the black gondola, and sailed up into the dead street, where everything was water, not a foot-breadth upon which to walk. Large buildings stood with open doors, and with steps down to the water; the water ran into the great doorways, like a canal; and the palace-court itself seemed only a four-cornered well, into which people could sail, but scarcely turn the gondola. The water had left its greenish slime upon the walls: the great marble palaces seemed as if sinking together: in the broad windows, rough boards were nailed up to the gilded, half-decayed beams. The proud giant-body seemed to be falling away piecemeal; the whole had an air of depression about it. The ringing of the bells ceased, not a sound, excepting the splash of the oars in the water, was to be heard, and I still saw not a human being. The magnificent Venice lay like a dead swan upon the waves.

We crossed about into the other streets; small narrow bridges of masonry hung over the canals; and I now saw people who skipped over me, in among the houses, and in among the walls even; for I saw no other streets than those in which the gondolas glided.

‘But where do the people walk?’ inquired I of my gondolier; and he pointed to small passages by the bridges, between the lofty houses. Neighbour could reach his hand to neighbour, from the sixth story across the street; three people could hardly pass each other below, where not a sunbeam found its way. Our gondola had passed on, and all was still as death.

HANS ANDERSEN.

‘FABRICS OF ENCHANTMENT PILED TO HEAVEN’

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds, Is this; an uninhabited seaside, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons; and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand thereon, Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down. This ride was my delight. I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be: And such was this wide ocean, and this shore More barren than its billows; and yet more Than all, with a remembered friend I love To ride as I then rode;--for the winds drove The living spray along the sunny air Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare, Stripped to their depths by the awakening north; And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth Harmonizing with solitude, and sent Into our hearts aërial merriment. So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought, Winging itself with laughter, lingered not, But flew from brain to brain,--such glee was ours, Charged with light memories of remembered hours, None slow enough for sadness: till we came Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame. This day had been cheerful but cold, and now The sun was sinking, and the wind also. Our talk grew somewhat serious, as may be Talk interrupted with such raillery As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn The thoughts it would extinguish:--’twas forlorn, Yet pleasing; such as once, so poets tell, The devils held within the dales of hell, Concerning God, freewill, and destiny. Of all that earth has been, or yet may be; All that vain men imagine or believe, Or hope can paint, or suffering can achieve, We descanted; and I (for ever still Is it not wise to make the best of ill?) Argued against despondency; but pride Made my companion take the darker side. The sense that he was greater than his kind Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind By gazing on its own exceeding light. Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight Over the horizon of the mountains--Oh! How beautiful is sunset, when the glow Of heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou paradise of exiles, Italy! Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers Of cities they encircle!--It was ours To stand on thee, beholding it: and then, Just where we had dismounted, the Count’s men Were waiting for us with the gondola. As those who pause on some delightful way, Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood, Looking upon the evening and the flood, Which lay between the city and the shore, Paved with the image of the sky: the hoar And aery Alps, towards the north, appeared, Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared Between the east and west; and half the sky Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry, Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep west into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent Among the many folded hills--they were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, As seen from Lido, through the harbour piles, The likeness of a clump of peakèd isles-- And then, as if the earth and sea had been Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame, Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. ‘Ere it fade,’ Said my companion, ‘I will show you soon A better station.’ So, o’er the lagoon We glided; and from that funereal bark I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark How from their many isles, in evening’s gleam, Its temples and its palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

VENICE SEEN IN THE DISTANCE

We ... were entering the fertile territory of the Bassanese. It was now I beheld groves of olives, and vines clustering the summits of the tallest elms; pomegranates in every garden, and vases of citron and orange before almost every door. The softness and transparency of the air soon told me I was arrived in happier climates, and I felt sensations of joy and novelty run through my veins, upon beholding this smiling land of groves and verdure stretched out before me. A few hazy vapours, I can hardly call them clouds, rested upon the extremities of the landscape; and, through their medium, the sun cast an oblique and dewy ray. Peasants were returning home, singing as they went, and calling to each other over the hills; whilst the women were milking goats before the wickets of the cottage, and preparing their country fare....

Our route to Venice lay winding along the variegated plains I had surveyed from Mosolente; and after dining at Treviso we came in two hours and a half to Mestre, between grand villas and gardens peopled with statues. Embarking our baggage at the last-mentioned place, we stepped into a gondola, whose even motion was very agreeable after the jolts of a chaise. We were soon out of the canal of Mestre, terminating by an isle which contains a cell dedicated to the Holy Virgin, peeping out of a thicket, whence spire up two tall cypresses. Its bells tinkled as we passed along and dropped some paolis into a net tied at the end of a pole stretched out to us for that purpose. As soon as we had doubled the cape of this diminutive island, an expanse of sea opened to our view, the domes and towers of Venice rising from its bosom. Now we began to distinguish Murano, St. Michele, St. Giorgio in Alga, and several other islands, detached from the grand cluster, which I hailed as old acquaintances; innumerable prints and drawings having long since made their shapes familiar. Still gliding forward, we every moment distinguished some new church or palace in the city, suffused with the rays of the setting sun, and reflected with all their glow of colouring from the surface of the waters.

The air was calm; the sky cloudless; a faint wind just breathing upon the deep, lightly bore its surface against the steps of a chapel in the island of San Secondo, and waved the veil before its portal, as we rowed by and coasted the walls of its garden overhung with fig-trees and surmounted by spreading pines. The convent discovers itself through their branches, built in a style somewhat morisco, and level with the sea, except where the garden intervenes.

We were now drawing very near the city, and a confused hum began to interrupt the evening stillness; gondolas were continually passing and repassing, and the entrance of the Canal Reggio, with all its stir and bustle, lay before us. Our gondoliers turned with much address through a crowd of boats and barges that blocked up the way, and rowed smoothly by the side of a broad pavement, covered with people in all dresses and of all nations.

WILLIAM BECKFORD.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF VENICE

It is easy to feel and to say something obvious about Venice. The influence of this sea-city is unique, immediate, and unmistakable. But to express the sober truth of those impressions which remain when the first astonishment of the Venetian revelation has subsided, when the spirit of the place has been harmonized through familiarity with our habitual mood, is difficult.

Venice inspires at first an almost Corybantic rapture. From our earliest visits, if these have been measured by days rather than weeks, we carry away with us the memory of sunsets emblazoned in gold and crimson upon cloud and water; of violet domes and bell-towers etched against the orange of a western sky; of moonlight silvering breeze-rippled breadths of liquid blue; of distant islands shimmering in sun-litten haze; of music and black gliding boats; of labyrinthine darkness made for mysteries of love and crime; of statue-fretted palace fronts; of brazen clangour and a moving crowd; of pictures by earth’s proudest painters, cased in gold on walls of council chambers where Venice sat enthroned a queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian brocade. These reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of loneliness and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless horizon, the solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and greyness of evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city crumbling to its grave in mud and brine.

These first impressions of Venice are true. Indeed they are inevitable. They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element of unrest and unreality which vanishes upon familiarity. From the blare of that triumphal bourdon of brass instruments emerge the delicate voices of violin and clarinet. To the contrasted passions of our earliest love succeed a multitude of sweet and fanciful emotions. It is my present purpose to recapture some of the impressions made by Venice in more tranquil moods. Memory might be compared to a kaleidoscope. Far away from Venice I raise the wonder-working tube, allow the glittering fragments to settle as they please, and with words attempt to render something of the patterns I behold.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

TOWARDS VENICE

The gates were opened and we passed into the sea. There was a ‘breath of Venice in the breeze;’ the odour of the lagoons, clear and pungent; a scent that seems to penetrate the being, to reach the very heart, and charms it to surrender. The evening wind sprang up behind, and we set our sail and prow for Venice, twenty-five miles away across the pearly grey lagoon. On and on we sailed while the day faded about us, deepening slowly into night. A fiery sunset flamed itself to death behind the Euganean Hills. The expanse of water quickened from grey to crimson, to gold, to orange, to pale burnished copper, dimpled and shadowed by the tiny waves, to purple as the night came down; then all this glory of colour withdrew once more into the pervasive pearly grey, as the last light died in the western heavens, and darkness stole silently over the waters....

It is the people and the place, the union and interpenetration of the two, the sea life of these dwellers in the city that is always ‘just putting out to sea,’ which constitutes for many the peculiar and enduring charm of Venice. The people and the place so intimately intermingled through all their long history, have grown into a single life charged with the richness of sea-nature and the warmth of human emotion. From both together escapes this essence or soul of Venice which we would clasp with all the ardour of a lover. Venice, her lagoons, her seafaring folk, become the object of a passionate idolatry which admits no other allegiance in the hearts that have known its power. To leave her is a sure regret; to return a certain joy.

HORATIO F. BROWN.

THE APPROACH TO VENICE

We come to a low wharf or quay at the extremity of a canal, with long steps on each side down to the water, which latter we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation; another glance undeceives us,--it is covered with the black boats of Venice. We enter one of them, rather to try if they be real boats or not, than with any definite purpose, and glide away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy. It is something clearer than any water we have seen lately, and of a pale green; the banks only two or three feet above it, of mud and rank grass, with here and there a stunted tree; gliding swiftly past the small casement of the gondola, as if they were dragged by upon a painted scene.

Stroke by stroke, we count the plunges of the oar, each heaving up the side of the boat slightly as her silver beak shoots forward. We lose patience, and extricate ourselves from the cushions: the sea air blows keenly by, as we stand leaning on the roof of the floating cell. In front, nothing to be seen but long canal and level bank; to the west, the tower of Mestre is lowering fast, and behind it there have risen purple shades, of the colour of dead rose-leaves, all round the horizon, feebly defined against the afternoon sky,--the Alps of Bassano. Forward still: the endless canal bends at last, and then breaks into intricate angles about some low bastions, now torn to pieces and staggering in ugly rents towards the water,--the bastions of the fort of Malghera. Another turn, and another perspective of canal; but not interminable. The silver beak cleaves it fast,--it widens: the rank grass of the banks sinks lower and lower, and at last dies in tawny knots along an expanse of weedy shore. Over it, on the right, but a few years back, we might have seen the lagoon stretching to the horizon, and the warm southern sky bending over Malamocco to the sea. Now we can see nothing but what seems a low and monotonous dockyard wall, with flat arches to let the tide through it;--this is the railroad bridge, conspicuous above all things. But at the end of those dismal arches there rises, out of the wide water, a straggling line of low and confused brick buildings, which, but for the many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English manufacturing town. Four or five domes, pale, and, apparently at a greater distance, rise over the centre of the line; but the object which first catches the eye is a sullen cloud of black smoke brooding over the northern half of it, and which issues from the belfry of a church.

It is Venice.

JOHN RUSKIN.

THE THRONE OF VENICE

In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long hoped for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent,--in those days, I say, when there was something more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder, there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveller, than that which ... brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named ‘St. George of the Seaweed.’ As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, 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! Stalì,’ struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the splash 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 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.