of the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot
that I had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment
very cold and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that
beautiful silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars.
Then on either hand I saw stately palaces rise grey and lofty from
the dark waters, holding here and there a lamp against their faces,
which brought balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary
relief, and threw long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see
by that uncertain glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old;
and so, unhaunted by any pang for the decay that afterward saddened
me amid the forlorn beauty of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it
was a proper time to think all the fantastic things in the world, and
I thought them; but they passed vaguely through my mind, without at
all interrupting the sensations of sight and sound. Indeed, the past
and present mixed here, and the moral and material were blent in the
sentiment of utter novelty and surprise. The quick boat slid through
old troubles of mine, and unlooked-for events gave it the impulse that
carried it beyond, and safely around sharp corners of life. And all
the while I knew that this was a progress through narrow and crooked
canals, and past marble angles of palaces. But I did not know then that
this fine confusion of sense and spirit was the first faint impression
of the charm of life in Venice.
Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers
had warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries;
the lines of balconied palaces had never ended;--here and there at
their doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving
uncertainly about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the
Grand Canal into one of the smaller channels, and from comparative
light into a darkness only remotely affected by some far-streaming
corner lamp. But always the pallid, stately palaces; always the dark
heaven with its trembling stars above, and the dark water with its
trembling stars below; but now innumerable bridges, and an utter
lonesomeness, and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could
not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary
passages, which was part of the strange enjoyment of the time, and
which was referable to the novelty, the hush, the darkness, and the
piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers. Was
not this Venice, and is not Venice for ever associated with bravoes and
unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise of mine might represent fabulous
wealth to the uncultivated imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could
understand the Facts of the Situation--(as we say in the journals)?
To move on was relief; to pause was regret for past transgressions
mingled with good resolutions for the future. But I felt the liveliest
mixture of all these emotions, when, slipping from the cover of a
bridge, the gondola suddenly rested at the foot of a stairway before a
closely-barred door. The gondoliers rang and rang again, while their
passenger ‘divided the swift mind,’ in the wonder whether a door so
grimly bolted and austerely barred could possibly open into a hotel,
with cheerful overcharges for candles and service. But as soon as
the door opened, and he beheld the honest swindling countenance of a
hotel _portier_, he felt secure against everything but imposture, and
all wild absurdities of doubt and conjecture at once faded from his
thought, when the _portier_ suffered the gondoliers to make him pay a
florin too much.
So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that
complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most
alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any
fragment of her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had
been penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had
been touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where
its presence offers, according to the humour in which it is studied,
constant occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness....
I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the first. I believe it
was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the beautiful that I
here found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full of society and
friendship, speaking a language which, even in its unfamiliar forms, I
could partly understand, and at once making me a citizen of that Venice
from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in the presence of the
great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt at home--indeed,
I could as yet understand their excellence and grandeur only very
imperfectly--but wherever I wandered through the quaint and marvellous
city, I found the good company of ‘The fair, the old;’ and to tell the
truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and I learned to turn
to it later from other companionship with a kind of relief.
W. D. HOWELLS.
IN VENICE
An hour before sunset I arrived at Fusina, and beheld, four or five
miles out at sea, the towers and cupolas of Venice suffused with a
rich golden light, and rising out of the bright blue waters. Not an
exclamation escaped me. I felt like a man who has achieved a great
object. I was full of calm exultation, but the strange incident of the
morning made me serious and pensive.
As our gondolas glided over the great lagoon, the excitement of the
spectacle reanimated me. The buildings that I had so fondly studied in
books and pictures rose up before me. I knew them all; I required no
cicerone. One by one, I caught the hooded cupolas of St. Mark, the tall
Campanile red in the sun, the Morescoe Palace of the Doges, the deadly
Bridge of Sighs, and the dark structure to which it leads. Here my
gondola quitted the lagoon, and, turning up a small canal, and passing
under a bridge which connected the quays, stopped at the steps of a
palace.
I ascended a staircase of marble, I passed through a gallery crowded
with statues, I was ushered into spacious apartments, the floors of
which were marble and the hangings satin. The ceilings were painted
by Tintoretto and his scholars, and were full of Turkish trophies and
triumphs over the Ottomite. The furniture was of the same rich material
as the hangings, and the gilding, although of two hundred years’
duration, as bright and burnished as the costly equipment of a modern
palace. From my balcony of blinds I looked upon the great lagoon. It
was one of those glorious sunsets which render Venice, in spite of
her degradation, still famous. The sky and sea vied in the brilliant
multiplicity of their blended tints. The tall shadows of her Palladian
churches flung themselves over the glowing and transparent wave out of
which they sprang. The quays were crowded with joyous groups, and the
black gondolas flitted like sea-serpents, over the red and rippling
waters.
I hastened to the Place of St. Mark. It was crowded and illuminated.
Three gorgeous flags waved on the mighty staffs, which are opposite to
the church in all the old drawings, and which once bore the standards
of Candia, and Cyprus, and the Morea. The coffee-houses were full, and
gay parties, seated on chairs in the open air, listened to the music
of military bands, while they refreshed themselves with confectionery
so rich and fanciful that it excites the admiration of all travellers,
but which I since discovered in Turkey to be Oriental. The variety of
costume was also great. The dress of the lower orders in Venice is
still unchanged; many of the middle classes yet wear the cap and cloak.
The Hungarian and the German military, and the bearded Jew, with his
black velvet cap and flowing robes, are observed with curiosity. A few
days also before my arrival, the Austrian squadron had carried into
Venice a Turkish ship and two Greek vessels, which had violated the
neutrality. Their crews now mingled with the crowd. I beheld, for the
first time, the haughty and turbaned Ottoman, sitting crossed-legged
on his carpet under a colonnade, sipping his coffee and smoking a
long chibouque, and the Greeks, with their small red caps, their high
foreheads, and arched eyebrows.
Can this be modern Venice, I thought? Can this be the silent, and
gloomy, and decaying city, over whose dishonourable misery I have so
often wept? Could it ever have been more enchanting? Are not these
indeed still subjects of a Doge, and still the bridegrooms of the
ocean? Alas, the brilliant scene was as unusual as unexpected, and
was accounted for by its being the feast day of a favourite Saint.
Nevertheless, I rejoiced at the unaccustomed appearance of the city at
my entrance, and still I recall with pleasure the delusive moments,
when, strolling about the Place of St. Mark, the first evening that I
was in Venice, I mingled for a moment in a scene that reminded me of
her lost light-heartedness, and of that unrivalled gaiety which so long
captivated polished Europe.
The moon was now in her pride. I wandered once more to the quay,
and heard for the first time a serenade. A juggler was conjuring in
a circle under the walls of my hotel, and an itinerant opera was
performing on the bridge. It is by moonlight that Venice is indeed
an enchanted city. The effect of the floods of silver light upon the
twinkling fretwork of the Moresco architecture, the total absence of
all harsh sounds, the never-ceasing music on the waters, produce an
effect upon the mind which cannot be experienced in any other city. As
I stood gazing upon the broad track of brilliant light that quivered
over the lagoon, a gondolier saluted me. I entered his boat, and
desired him to row me to the Grand Canal.
The marble palaces of my ancestors rose on each side, like a series of
vast and solemn temples. How sublime were their broad fronts bathed
in the mystic light, whose softened tints concealed the ravages of
Time, and made us dream only of their eternity! And could these great
creations ever die! I viewed them with a devotion which I cannot
believe to have been surpassed in the most patriotic period of the
Republic. How willingly would I have given my life to have once more
filled their mighty halls with the proud retainers of their free and
victorious nobles!
As I proceeded along the canal, and retired from the quarter of St.
Mark, the sounds of merriment gradually died away. The light string
of a guitar alone tinkled in the distance, and the lamp of a gondola,
swiftly shooting by, indicated some gay, perhaps anxious, youth,
hastening to the general rendezvous of festivity and love. The course
of the canal bent, and the moon was hid behind a broad, thick arch,
which black, yet sharply defined, spanned the breadth of the water. I
beheld the famous Rialto.
Was it possible? was it true? was I not all this time in a reverie
gazing upon a drawing in Winter’s studio! Was it not some delicious
dream? some delicious dream from which perhaps this moment I was about
to be roused to cold, dull life? I struggled not to wake, yet, from a
nervous desire to move and put the vision to the test, I ordered the
gondolier to row to the side of the canal, jumped out, and hurried to
the bridge. Each moment I expected that the arch would tremble and
part, and that the surrounding palaces would dissolve into mist, that
the lights would be extinguished and the music cease, and that I should
find myself in my old chamber in my father’s house.
I hurried along; I was anxious to reach the centre of the bridge
before I woke. It seemed like the crowning incident of a dream, which,
it is remarkable, never occurs, and which, from the very anxiety it
occasions, only succeeds in breaking our magical slumbers.
I stood upon the Rialto; I beheld on each side of me, rising out of the
waters, which they shadowed with their solemn image, those colossal
and gorgeous structures raised from the spoils of the teeming Orient,
with their pillars of rare marbles, and their costly portals of jasper,
and porphyry, and agate; I beheld them ranged in majestic order, and
streaming with the liquid moonlight.
LORD BEACONSFIELD.
ENTERING VENICE AT TWILIGHT
Nothing could exceed Emily’s admiration on her first view of Venice,
with its islets, palaces, and towers rising out of the sea, whose
clear surface reflected the tremulous picture in all its colours. The
sun, sinking in the west, tinted the waves and the lofty mountains of
Friuli, which skirt the northern shores of the Adriatic, with a saffron
glow, while on the marble porticos and colonnades of St. Mark were
thrown the rich lights and shades of evening. As they glided on, the
grander features of this city appeared more distinctly: its terraces,
crowned with airy yet majestic fabrics, touched, as they now were, with
the splendour of the setting sun, appeared as if they had been called
up from the ocean by the wand of an enchanter, rather than reared by
mortal hands.
The sun, soon after, sinking to the lower world, the shadow of the
earth stole gradually over the waves, and then up the towering sides
of the mountains of Friuli, till it extinguished even the last upward
beams that had lingered on their summits, and the melancholy purple of
evening drew over them like a thin veil. How deep, how beautiful was
the tranquillity that wrapped the scene! All nature seemed to repose;
the finest emotions of the soul were alone awake. Emily’s eyes filled
with tears of admiration and sublime devotion, as she raised them
over the sleeping world to the vast heavens, and heard the notes of
solemn music that stole over the waters from a distance. She listened
in still rapture, and no person of the party broke the charm by an
inquiry. The sounds seemed to grow on the air; for so smoothly did
the barge glide along, that its motion was not perceivable, and the
fairy city appeared approaching to welcome the strangers. They now
distinguished a voice, accompanied by a few instruments, singing a soft
and mournful air, and its fine expression, as it sometimes seemed,
pleading with the impassioned tenderness of love, and then languishing
into the cadence of hopeless grief, declared that it flowed from no
feigned sensibility.... The deep twilight that had fallen over the
scene admitted only imperfect images to the eye, but at some distance
on the sea she thought she perceived a gondola: a chorus of voices and
instruments now swelled on the air--so sweet, so solemn! seemed like
the hymn of angels descending through the silence of night! Now it
died away, and fancy almost beheld the holy choir reascending towards
heaven; then again it swelled with the breeze, trembled awhile, and
again died into silence.... The gay and busy scene that appeared, as
the barge approached St. Mark’s Place, at length roused her attention.
The rising moon, which threw a shadowy light upon the terrace, and
illumined the porticos and magnificent arcades that crowned them,
discovered the various company, whose light steps, soft guitars, and
softer voices, echoed through the colonnades.
The music they heard before now passed Montoni’s barge in one of the
gondolas, of which several were seen skimming along the moonlight sea,
full of gay parties, catching the cool breeze. Most of these had music,
made sweeter by the waves over which it floated, and by the measured
sound of oars as they dashed the sparkling tide.... The barge passed
on to the Grand Canal, where Montoni’s mansion was situated. And here
other forms of beauty and of grandeur, such as her imagination had
never painted, were unfolded to Emily in the palaces of Sansovino and
Palladio, as she glided along the waves. The air bore no sounds but
those of sweetness, echoing along each margin of the canal, and from
gondolas on its surface, while groups of masks were seen dancing on
the moonlight terraces, and seemed almost to realize the romance of
fairyland.... The singers sung in parts, the verses of Ariosto. They
sung of the wars of the Moors against Charlemagne, and then of the
woes of Orlando: afterwards the measure changed, and the melancholy
sweetness of Petrarch succeeded. The magic of his grief was assisted by
all that Italian expression, heightened by the enchantments of Venetian
moonlight, could give.
MRS. RADCLIFFE.
THE SEA SPELL
‘Venice herself is poetry, and creates a poet out of the
dullest clay.’ It was a poet who spoke, and his clay
was instinct with the breath of genius. But it is true
that Venice lends wings to duller clay; it has been her
fate to make poets of many who were not so before--a
responsibility that entails loss on her as well as gain.
She has lived--she has loved and suffered and created; and
the echoes of her creation are with us still; the pulse of
the life which once she knew continues to throb behind the
loud and insistent present.
BERYL DE SÉLINCOURT AND MAY STURGE HENDERSON.
... O! for the echo on Lido’s shore
Of the grey Adriatic’s sullen roar,
And the tender blue which sunset throws
On our Euganean hills,
While the Grand Canal is a path of rose,
And the watery mist with radiance fills,
And the mighty palaces loom pale
Like battlements in a fairy tale.
LADY LINDSAY.
The great Venetian heaven, overarching the lagoon, has
especially this power to fascinate, to take one suddenly by
surprise with an unlooked-for revelation of its beauty, its
greatness, and its immortal activity; charging the spirit
with some transport of the skies, and compelling it to its
knees in adoration.
HORATIO F. BROWN.
Ah! you never yet
Were far away from Venice, never saw
Her beautiful towers in the receding distance,
While every furrow of the vessel’s track
Seem’d ploughing deep into your heart; you never
Saw day go down upon your native spires
So calmly with its gold and crimson glory,
And after dreaming a disturbed vision
Of them and theirs, awoke and found them not.
LORD BYRON.
THE LAGOONS’ PHANTOM SPELL
The lagoons are full of mysteries of light; they are a veritable
treasure ground of illusion. They are not one expanse of water over
which the light broods with equable influence; they form a region
of various circles, as it were, of various degrees of remoteness or
tangibility. Almost one feels that each circle must be inhabited by
a spirit appropriate to itself, and that a common language could not
be between them, so sharp are the limits set by the play of light. On
an early autumn morning, when the sky is clear and the sun streams
full and level upon the clear blue expanse that separates Venice and
Mestre, we seem to have a firm foothold on this dancing water. It is
a substantial glory; but as our eye flits on from jewel to jewel in
the clear blue paving, a sudden line is drawn beyond which it may not
pass. The rich flood of vital colour has its bounds, and beyond it
lies a region bathed in light so intense that even colour is refined
into a mystic whiteness--a mirror of crystal, devoid of substance,
infinitely remote; and above it, suspended in that lucent unearthly
atmosphere, hover the towers of Torcello and Burano, like a mirage
of the desert, midway between the water and the sky. They hang there
in completest isolation, yet with a precise definition, a startling
clearness of contour. There is no vestige of other buildings or of the
earth on which they stand, only the dome and campanile of Murano, the
leaning spire of Burano and Mazzorbo’s lightning-blasted tower, their
reflections distinctly mirrored in a luminous medium, half mist, half
water. There is an immense awe in the vision of these phantoms, caught
up into a region where the happy radiant colour dares not play; and
yet not veiled--clearer in what they choose to reveal than the near
city strong and splendid in the unreserve of the young day, but so
unearthly, so magical, that our morning spirits scarcely dare accost
them. What boat shall navigate that shining nothingness that divides
them from our brave and brilliant water?
Venice, indeed, at times falls under the phantom spell. In those
mornings of late autumn when the duel between the sun and the scirocco
seems as if it could not end till day is done and night calls up
her reinforcements of mist, Venice is herself the ghost, her goblet
brimming with a liquor that seems the drink of death, a perilous, grey,
steely vapour. One only of her islands looms out of the enfolding,
foggy blanket: it is San Michele, the island of the dead. On such a
morning we may visit this abode of shadows, not at this hour more
strange, more ghostly, than the city.
BERYL DE SÉLINCOURT AND MAY STURGE HENDERSON.
VENETIAN SPELL
O spell of dawn!
From opal skies a roseate mist floats out,
And slowly wraps the towers and domes about.
All Venice sleeps--nay, yonder a black barge
Slides to the open from the dusky marge.
O spell of silence!
Peace of mind and soul--the plash of oars,
Perchance a distant bell from island shores;
Upon the glassy stillness of the mere
No other sound to vex a fretful ear.
O spell of age!
Historic scenes and names and memories
Are bulwarks of the city in the seas;
Each palace is a book, a scroll each wall--
The sculptured poems hold our hearts in thrall.
O spell of night!
First wanness, then the blue, then sudden dark;
Quiv’ring reflection from each tiny spark;
The water makes a mirror for the moon,
The heavens become a star-beflecked lagoon.
O spell of beauty!
Like the goddess of grey legend-lore,
Cypris or Hulda, sung in runes of yore,
She--Venice--binds men with a magic chain--
Her slaves, that gave an hour, through life remain.
LADY LINDSAY.
THE SOUL THAT ENDURES
On an evening of late September Venice revealed herself to one of her
lovers amidst a spectacle beyond any range of dreams. Evening was
closing in upon the city with cloud and breeze.... The tide was low,
and land and water stretched out in interchanging coils of olive and
azure beneath a purple storm-cloud, whilst ever against the bar of
the Lido rolled the sea, dyed with that celestial blue that sometimes
steals from the Adriatic into the basin of San Marco to prostrate
itself at the conquering Lion’s feet. And there lay Venice, her form
outlined against a flood of pearl, the water bending in a tender,
luminous bow behind her towers. Far away, across the mysterious
expanse of low lagoon, Torcello and Burano gleamed out in startling
pallor against the storm, amid a wild confusion of dark earth and
glittering water. The Northern Alps were hidden in darkness at the
horizon, but westward across the mainland the clear, sharp peaks of
the Euganean hills rose up behind the city’s pearly halo, behind the
deep blue of the surging lowlands, in almost unearthly outline against
the sunset sky. In front of them a livid fire rolled sullenly along
the valley, sending up purple smoke into the cloud. The storm genie,
summoned by nether powers, was descending to his fearful tryst behind
the Euganeans, but, as he sank, he bent his face upon the pale form
of Venice, his enchantress, and the fire of his wonder and of his
adoration kindled in all her slumbering limbs a glow of responsive
life. A flood of crimson suffused the pallor of her pearly diadem, and
her maidens, sleeping grey among the waters round her, unfolded rosy
petals upon the surface of the lagoon.
It is this power of living communion with the daily pageant in which
sun and moon are doge and emperor, and the stars and the clouds their
retinue--this it is which, finding expression once at Venice in a
temporal glory that has passed away, is the abiding assurance of her
immortality. This is the spirit which, if once it helped to make her
great, still makes her great to-day, the spirit that endures.
BERYL DE SÉLINCOURT AND MAY STURGE HENDERSON.
VENICE
The sylphs and ondines,
And the sea-kings and queens,
Long ago; long ago, on the waves built a city,
As lovely as seems
To some bard, in his dreams,
The soul of his latest love-ditty.
Long ago, long ago,--ah! that was long ago
Thick as gems on the chalices
Kings keep for treasure,
Were the temples and palaces
In this city of pleasure;
And the night broke out shining
With lamps and with festival,
O’er the squares, o’er the streets;
And the soft sea went, pining
With love, through the musical,
Musical bridges, and marble retreats
Of this city of wonder, where dwelt the ondines,
Long ago, and the sylphs, and the sea-kings and queens.