It was a long, long ride. But toward evening, as we sat silent and
hardly conscious of where we were—subdued into that meditative calm that
comes so surely after a conversational storm—some one shouted:
“VENICE!”
And sure enough, afloat on the placid sea a league away, lay a great
city with its towers and domes and steeples drowsing in a golden midst
of sunset.
The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject for
flippant speech or the idle gossiping of tourists. It seems a sort of
sacrilege to disturb the glamour of old romance that pictures her to us
softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, and curtains her ruin and
her desolation from our view. One ought, indeed, to turn away from her
rags, her poverty, and her humiliation, and think of her only as she was
when she sunk the fleets of Charlemagne; when she humbled Frederick
Barbarossa or waved her victorious banners above the battlements of
Constantinople.
There was music everywhere—choruses, string bands, brass bands, flutes,
everything. I was so surrounded, walled in with music, magnificence, and
loveliness, that I became inspired with the spirit of the scene, and
sang one tune myself. However, when I observed that the other gondolas
had sailed away, and my gondolier was preparing to go overboard, I
stopped.
In the glare of the day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under
the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered
sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old city seems crowned once
more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago. It is easy,
then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and
fair ladies—with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon
the rich argosies of Venetian commerce—with Othellos and Desdemonas,
with Iagos and Roderigos—with noble fleets and victorious legions
returning from the wars. In the treacherous sunlight we see Venice
decayed, forlorn, poverty-stricken, and commerceless—forgotten and
utterly insignificant. But in the moonlight, her fourteen centuries of
greatness fling their glories about her, and once more is she the
princeliest among the nations of the earth.
Yes, I think we have seen all Venice. We have seen in these old churches
a profusion of costly and elaborate sepulchre ornamentation such as we
never dreamt of before. We have stood in the dim religious light of
these hoary sanctuaries, in the midst of long ranks of dusty monuments
and effigies of the great dead of Venice, until we seemed drifting back,
back, back, into the solemn past, and looking upon the scenes and
mingling with the people of a remote antiquity. We have been in a
half-waking sort of a dream all the time. I do not know how else to
describe the feeling. A part of our being has remained still in the
nineteenth century, while another part of it has seemed in some
unaccountable way walking among the phantoms of the tenth.
We have seen famous pictures until our eyes are weary with looking at
them and refuse to find interest in them any longer.... We have striven
hard to learn. We have had some success. We have mastered some things,
possibly of trifling import in the eyes of the learned, but to us they
give pleasure, and we take as much pride in our little acquirements as
do others who have learned far more, and we love to display them full as
well. When we see a monk going about with a lion and looking tranquilly
up to heaven, we know that that is St. Mark. When we see a monk with a
book and a pen, looking tranquilly up to heaven, trying to think of a
word, we know that that is St. Matthew. When we see a monk sitting on a
rock, looking tranquilly up to heaven, with a human skull beside him,
and without other baggage, we know that that is St. Jerome. Because we
know that he always went flying light in the matter of baggage. When we
see a party looking tranquilly up to heaven, unconscious that his body
is shot through and through with arrows, we know that that is St.
Sebastian. When we see other monks looking tranquilly up to heaven, but
having no trademark, we always ask who those parties are. We do this
because we humbly wish to learn....
And so, having satisfied ourselves, we depart to-morrow, and leave the
venerable Queen of the Republics to summon her vanished ships, and
marshal her shadowy armies, and know again in dreams the pride of her
old renown.