Part 13 (1/2)

VOLUME II, CHAPTER I

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 sure where he was to rest, scattered a 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 so more to be anticipated and re-place, than a new arrangeirder, there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveller, than that which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought hiondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of soht disappoints are far less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, andof 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 whiteand disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaireat 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 froold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly nae of the Seaweed” As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind hiularly with brushwood and s: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyraoon; two or three ses of inferior hill extended the 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 offar back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, intoup behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back fro of the canified 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 outh 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 e cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the extreht vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth froe curve, so delicate, so adaraceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its ondolier's cry, ”Ah! Stal,”[137]

struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the hty 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,[138] it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charet the darker truths of its history and its being

Well ht 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 ild or merciless,--Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests,--had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and es to come, that beauty which seelass 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 theh the noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen no ine slackens its rushi+ng on the iron line; and though many of her palaces are for ever defaced, and ic in her aspect, that the hurried traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has been worn away, in, 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 iination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the inoble, and disguise what is discordant, in a scene so rich in its re in its beauty But for this work of the i the task which is before us The iularly characteristic of this century, htier ages to which they are attached like clinificent fragth 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 ofof yesterday, a e dreaht must dissipate into dust No prisoner, whose na, or whose sorrow deserved syhs,” which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice;[139] no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with breathless interest: the statue which Byron reat ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's death;[140] 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[141] could be sualley 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 es would not knohat 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 doith bitterness to the grave The remains of _their_ Venice lie hidden behind the cuht of the nation in its dotage; hidden in htless canal, where the sloaves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and lean and gather thee of the lost city; eous 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 rasped by the indolence of iination, but only after frank inquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene, whose restless tides and tre 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 isloop for 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 debris on its opposite sides The rock fragments and sediment which the torrents on the other 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 froh Alps, and from the northern slope of the Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or ment which thunder breaks out of their battlerain 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 ine, but for two contrary influences which continually depress, or disperse froes

I will not tax the reader's faith in ular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which appears for many centuries to have taken place steadily and continually; the radual transport, by the Po and its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of the finer sediment to the sea The character of the Loly expressed by the ancient walls of its cities, coe rounded Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses of brick; and was curiously illustrated in 1848, by the rah round every field, to check the Austrian cavalry in the battle under the walls of Verona[142] The finer dust a 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 reat chain, they become of the colour and opacity of clay before they reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once thron as they enter the sea, for 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 e than the delta of the central river In one of these tracts is built RAVENNA, and in the other VENICE

What circureat belt of sediment in the earliest tih for us to know that froe to those of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of from three to five miles fro islands by narrow channels of sea The space between this bank and the true shore consists of the sedireat plain of calcareous hbourhood 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, fro to the run of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets, consolidated, soh 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 loater, shallow lakelets glitter aularly exposed fields of seaweed In the est of these, increased in ie 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 rees, or isolated convents and churches, scattered around, partly waste and encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the e 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 h water no land is visible for many miles to the north or south of Venice, except in the fores: 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 i been built in the h the secret of its true position is partly, yet not painfully, betrayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the deepwater 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 croaves that flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the uplifted 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 co in the reen, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streah this salt and so-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 bottoh 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 aht 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 so: but, in order to knohat it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at evening the windings of some unfrequented channel far into the ination, the brightness of the great city that still extends itself in the distance, and the walls and towers froht investiture and sarmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, couor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit fro cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart hich this solitude was anciently chosen by ht, 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 sorroilderness, let it be res which no huination could have foretold, and how the whole existence and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or co 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 refineed for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary sea-port 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 so 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 loater, a treacherous mass of weeds and liher classes, in their easy and daily intercourse, must have been done aith 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 forht to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the wisdoo, we had been per of the sliaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the lifeless, ieable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose hich 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 seelorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how little iloorass a 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, fro heart of her Fortitude and Splendour

[136] The palace of the Caraceful work of the early Renaissance (1525) passing into Ro approxiht”

[138] See note 1, p 129

[139] _Childe Harold_, 4 1

[140] _Marino Faliero_, 3 1 22 ff

[141] Dandolo [c 1108-1205] and Foscari [1372-1457] were aes

[142] In the battle of Custozza, 1848, the Austrians defeated the Piedmontese

ST MARK'S

VOLUME II, CHAPTER 4

”And so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus” If as the shores of Asia lessened upon his sight, the spirit of prophecy had entered into the heart of the weak disciple who had turned back when his hand was on the plough, and who had been judged, by the chiefest of Christ's captains, unworthy thenceforward to go forth with hiht it, that by the lion sy men! hooful, that the war-cry of his nae of the soldier, on those very plains where he hie of the Christian, and so often dye with fruitless blood that very Cypriot Sea, over whose waves, in repentance and sha the Son of Consolation!

That the Venetians possessed themselves of his body in the ninth century, there appears no sufficient reason to doubt, nor that it was principally in consequence of their having done so, that they chose him for their patron saint There exists, however, a tradition that before he went into Egypt he had founded the church at Aquileia, and was thus in some sort the first bishop of the Venetian isles and people I believe that this tradition stands on nearly as good grounds as that of St Peter having been the first bishop of Rome[144]; but, as usual, it is enriched by various later additions and e the church of Murano Thus we find it recorded by the Santo Padre who compiled the _Vife de' Santi spettanti alle Chiese di Venezia_,[145] that ”St Mark having seen the people of Aquileia well grounded in religion, and being called to Ro off took with hioras, and went in a small boat to the marshes of Venice There were at that period soh bank called Rialto, and the boat being driven by the as anchored in a marshy place, when St Mark, snatched into ecstasy, heard the voice of an angel saying to him: 'Peace be to thee, Mark; here shall thy body rest'” The angel goes on to foretell the building of ”una stupenda, ne piu veduta Citta”[146]; but the fable is hardly ingenious enough to deserve farther relation

But whether St Mark was first bishop of Aquileia or not, St Theodore was the first patron of the city; nor can he yet be considered as having entirely abdicated his early right, as his statue, standing on a crocodile, still co pillar of the piazzetta A church erected to this Saint is said to have occupied, before the ninth century, the site of St Mark's; and the traveller, dazzled by the brilliancy of the great square, ought not to leave it without endeavouring to ireen field cloister-like and quiet,[147] divided by a small canal, with a line of trees on each side; and extending between the two churches of St Theodore and St Gemanium, as the little piazza of Torcello lies between its ”palazzo” and cathedral

But in the year 813, when the seat of government was finally removed to the Rialto, a Ducal Palace, built on the spot where the present one stands, with a Ducal Chapel beside it,[148] gave a very different character to the Square of St Mark; and fifteen years later, the acquisition of the body of the Saint, and its deposition in the Ducal Chapel, perhaps not yet completed, occasioned the investiture of that chapel with all possible splendour St Theodore was deposed from his patronshi+p, and his church destroyed, to randizement of the one attached to the Ducal Palace, and thenceforward known as ”St Mark's”[149]