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.
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 been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her
origin, and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, at
least, are little to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities
of the imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to
repress the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is
ignoble, and disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its
remembrances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for this work of the
imagination there must be no permission during the task which is before
us. The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of
this century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those
mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and
they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would
see them as they stood in their own strength. Those feelings, always
as fruitless as they are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of
protecting, but even of discerning, the objects to which they ought to
have been attached. The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing
of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the
first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose
name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever
crossed that ‘Bridge of Sighs,’ which is the centre of the Byronic
ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under
which the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue
which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors
was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after
Faliero’s death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been
so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries that if
Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from their tombs,
and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the Grand
Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter’s favourite subject, the
novelist’s favourite scene, where the water first narrows by the
steps of the Church of La Salute,--the mighty Doges would not know in
what part of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one
stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude,
their grey hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave.
The remains of _their_ Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses
which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a
grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the
slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and
must soon prevail over them for ever. It must be our task to glean and
gather them forth, and restore out of them some faint image of the lost
city; more gorgeous a thousandfold than that which now exists, yet not
created in the day-dream of the prince, nor by the ostentation of the
noble, but built by iron hands and patient hearts, contending against
the adversity of nature and the fury of man, so that its wonderfulness
cannot be grasped by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank
inquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene, whose
restless tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the
city, but long denied her dominion.
When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no feature by
which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping loop
formed by the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the
great basin of Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain upon itself
causes a vast difference in the character of the distribution of its
débris on its opposite sides. The rock fragments and sediments which
the torrents on the north side of the Alps bear into the plains are
distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here and there
lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm substrata
to appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which descend
from the southern side of the High Alps, and from the northern slope
of the Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or mountain bay
which the two ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks
out of their battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer
rain washes from their pastures, is at last laid at rest in the blue
sweep of the Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within
its rocky barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary
influences which continually depress, or disperse from its surface, the
accumulation of the ruins of ages.
I will not tax the reader’s faith in modern science by insisting on
the singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which appears for
many centuries to have taken place steadily and continually; the main
fact with which we have to do is the gradual transport, by the Po and
its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of the finer sediment to
the sea. The character of the Lombardic plains is most strikingly
expressed by the ancient walls of its cities, composed for the most
part of large rounded Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses
of brick; and was curiously illustrated in 1848, by the ramparts of
these same pebbles thrown up four or five feet high round every field,
to check the Austrian cavalry in the battle under the walls of Verona.
The finer dust among which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by
the rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine snow, so that,
however pure their waters may be when they issue from the lakes at
the foot of the great chain, they become of the colour and opacity of
clay before they reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is
at once thrown down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low
land along the eastern coast of Italy. The powerful stream of the Po of
course builds forward the fastest; on each side of it, north and south,
there is a tract of marsh, fed by more feeble streams, and less liable
to rapid change than the delta of the central river. In one of these
tracts is built Ravenna, and in the other VENICE.
What circumstances directed the peculiar arrangement of this great belt
of sediment in the earliest times it is not here the place to inquire.
It is enough for us to know that from the mouths of the Adige to those
of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of from three to
five miles from the actual shore, a bank of sand, divided into long
islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this bank and the
true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and other
rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighbourhood
of Venice, by the sea at high water, to the depth in most places of a
foot or a foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at low tide,
but divided by an intricate network of narrow and winding channels,
from which the sea never retires. In some places, according to the run
of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets, consolidated,
some by art, and some by time, into ground firm enough to be built
upon, or fruitful enough to be cultivated: in others, on the contrary,
it has not reached the sea-level; so that, at the average low water,
shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of
seaweed. In the midst of the largest of these, increased in importance
by the confluence of several large river channels towards one of
the openings in the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built,
on a crowded cluster of islands; the various plots of higher ground
which appear to the north and south of this central cluster have at
different periods been also thickly inhabited, and now bear, according
to their size, the remains of cities, villages, or isolated convents
and churches, scattered among spaces of open ground, partly waste and
encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the
metropolis.
The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet (varying
considerably with the seasons); but this fall, on so flat a shore,
is enough to cause continual movement in the waters, and in the main
canals to produce a reflux which frequently runs like a mill stream.
At high water no land is visible for many miles to the north or south
of Venice, except in the form of small islands crowned with towers or
gleaming with villages: there is a channel, some three miles wide,
between the city and the mainland, and some mile and a half wide
between it and the sandy breakwater called the Lido, which divides the
lagoon from the Adriatic, but which is so low as hardly to disturb the
impression of the city’s having been built in the midst of the ocean,
although the secret of its true position is partly, yet not painfully,
betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deep-water channels,
which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs of
huge sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and
crowded waves that flicker 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 seaweed, of
gloomy green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and
its associated streams converge towards 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 tracts 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 compelled, by the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and
the sea. Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies
would again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had
stronger surges beaten their shores all the richness and refinement of
the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and
bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been no tide, as in other
parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have
become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had
the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the
water-access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible:
even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in
landing without setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps; and the
highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow the entrance
halls. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the
flood and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low
water, a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system
of water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily
intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city
would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the
peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.
The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast between
this faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne and the romantic
conception of it which we ordinarily form: but this pain, if he have
felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the
instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the
wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been
permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid
rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh
waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little
could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were
shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their
desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than
of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the
glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hands are all
the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which
were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks,
and feeding the bitter grass among their shallows, there was indeed a
preparation, and _the only preparation possible_, for the founding of
a city which was to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the
earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges,
and to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in
world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from the
burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendour!
JOHN RUSKIN.
THE JEWELLED CROWN OF VENICE
In days before the railway and its bridge had done away with the island
apartness of Venice, it seemed like a dream of Young Romance to drop
through the narrow canal from Mestre on the mainland and come upon the
far-spread shimmer of the silvery lagoon; and, rowing slowly, see,
through veils of morning mist, the distant towers, walls, churches,
palaces, rise slowly, one after another, out of the breast of the
waters--silver and rose and gold out of the sapphire, azure, and pale
grey--a jewelled crown of architecture on the head of slumbering ocean.
We forgot that fairyland had been driven from the earth, and saw, or
dreamed we saw, the city of Morgan le Fay, or the palaces of the Happy
Isles where the Everyoung found refuge in the sea--so lovely and so dim
the city climbed out of the deep.
That vision is gone, but even now there are few visions more startling
in their charm than that which befalls the weary traveller when, coming
out of the dark station, he finds himself suddenly upon the marble
quay, with a river of glittering waters before his eyes, fringed with
churches, palaces, and gardens; the broad stream alive with black
gondolas, shouts in his ears like the shouting of seamen; and, lower
in note and cry, but heard more distinctly than all other sounds, the
lapping of the water on the steps of stone, the rushing of the tide
against the boats. Midst all the wonders of the city, this it is which
first seizes on his heart. It is the first note of the full melody of
charm which the sea in Venice will play upon his imagination for many a
happy day.
STOPFORD A. BROOKE.
VENICE FROM THE EUGANEAN HILLS
Ay, many Lowering islands lie
In the waters of wide Agony:
To such a one this morn was led,
My bark by soft winds piloted:
’Mid the mountains Euganean
I stood listening to the pæan,
With which the legioned rooks did hail
The sun’s uprise majestical;
Gathering round with wings all hoar,
Through the dewy mist they soar
Like grey shades, till the eastern heaven
Bursts, and then, as clouds of even,
Flecked with fire and azure, lie
In the unfathomable sky,
So their plumes of purple grain,
Starred with drops of golden rain,
Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes
On the morning’s fitful gale
Through the broken mist they sail,
And the vapours cloven and gleaming
Follow down the dark steep streaming,
Till all is bright, and clear, and still,
Round the solitary hill.
Beneath is spread, like a green sea,
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;
Underneath day’s azure eyes
Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies,
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite’s destined halls,
Which her hoary sire now paves
With his blue and beaming waves.
Lo! the sun upsprings behind,
Broad, red, radiant, half reclined
On the level quivering line
Of the waters crystalline;
And before that chasm of light,
As within a furnace bright,
Column, tower, and dome, and spire,
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies;
As the flames of sacrifice
From the marble shrines did rise,
As to pierce the dome of gold
Where Apollo spoke of old.
Sun-girt City, thou hast been
Ocean’s child, and then his queen
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier.
A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne, among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the seamew
Flies, as once before it flew,
O’er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown
Like a rock of ocean’s own
Topples o’er the abandoned sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day,
Will spread his sail and seize his oar
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o’er the starlight deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death
O’er the waters of his path.
Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through aerial gold,
As I now behold them here,
Would imagine not they were
Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourished worms
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering:
But if Freedom should awake
In her omnipotence, and shake
From the Celtic Anarch’s hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chained like thee, ingloriously,
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime;
If not, perish thou and they,
Clouds which stain truth’s rising day
By her sun consumed away,
Earth can spare ye: while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring
With more kindly blossoming.
Perish! let there only be
Floating o’er thy hearthless sea,
As the garment of thy sky
Clothes the world immortally,
One remembrance, more sublime
Than the tattered pall of time,
Which scarce hides thy visage wan;
That a tempest-cleaving swan
Of the songs of Albion,
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion
That its joy grew his, and sprung
From his lips like music flung
O’er a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror: what though yet
Poesy’s unfailing river,
Which through Albion winds for ever,
Lashing with melodious wave
Many a sacred poet’s grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled!
What though thou with all thy dead
Scarce can for this fame repay
Aught thine own,--oh, rather say,
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul!
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander’s wasting springs;
As divinest Shakespeare’s might
Fills Avon and the world with light
Like omniscient power, which he
Imaged ’mid mortality;
As the love from Petrarch’s urn,
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,
A quenchless lamp, by which the heart
Sees things unearthly; so thou art,
Mighty spirit: so shall be
The city that did refuge thee.
Lo, the sun floats up the sky
Like thought-wingèd Liberty,
Till the universal light
Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread,
And the beams of morn lie dead
On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
THE CITY OF ENCHANTMENT
I think there can be nothing else in the world so full of glittering
and exquisite surprise as that first glimpse of Venice which the
traveller catches as he issues from the railway station by night, and
looks upon her peerless strangeness. There is something in the blessed
breath of Italy (how quickly; coming South, you know it, and how bland
it is, after the harsh, transalpine air!) which prepares you for your
nocturnal advent into the place; and O you! whoever you are, that
journey toward this enchanted city for the first time, let me tell you
how happy I count you! There lies before you for your pleasure the
spectacle of such singular beauty as no picture can ever show you nor
book tell you,--beauty which you shall feel perfectly but once, and
regret for ever.