4 THE STONES OF VENICE

which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre.¹ 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 seabirds, 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.”² As the boat drew nearer to the city, the

¹ [See Plate E, “The Vestibule,” in Vol. IX.; and for Ruskin’s earliest impressions of the approach to Venice, see Velasquez, the Novice, Vol. I. pp. 537-545.]

² [For another notice of this view see in the next volume, Venetian Index, s. “Giorgio in Alga,” where a note added in 1877 describes how “all is spoiled from what it was.” See also the letter to C. E. Norton, in Vol. IX. p. xxviii. The sketch here given (Plate A) was made in 1849; another sketch made in the same year was engraved for Modern Painters, vol. iii. (Plate 15). In Ruskin’s diary (1851) we get a word-picture of a similar effect:-

“November 19.-There was a lovely scene this evening out by San Giorgio in Aliga. It had been raining nearly all night and was very foul weather to-day and wretchedly cold, and the snow was down on the hills, nearly to the plains. And there was the strange snow mist upon them-not cloud, but a kind of dense light breaking into flakes and wreathes, and the upper precipices came gleaming out here and there fitfully in the haze, their jagged edges burning like lightning, then losing themselves again in blue bars of clouds, to the north disappearing altogether in one mass of leaden grey, against which the whole line of Venice came out in broad red light. As the sun set, there were fiery flakes and streams of long cloud brought out from this grey veil, and the

[Version 0.04: March 2008]