6 THE STONES OF VENICE

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;¹ 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! Stali,”* struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the plash 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

* Appendix 1: “The Gondolier’s Cry” [p. 441.]

† Appendix 2: “Our Lady of Salvation” [p. 443].

Yesterday was a wonderful day: the breaking-up of our week of fine weather, and the whole chain of the Alps were bare and bright in the strange sharp clearness which one only has before rain, seen along the horizon in a belt of open sky. ...

“November 27.-Yesterday there was one blue-grey mass of dark cloud upon the plains running along the whole horizon-not a bit of the bases visible, but their tops out, so-[sketch] in glowing rose light. You never saw anything so fine (even the Bernese Alps are hardly so grand), and they rise from the dead level of the sea; contrasting so suddenly with the waste of lagoon and sand island. ...”]

¹ [See in the next volume, Venetian Index, s. “Salute.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]