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.
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