George of the Seaweed." As
the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had
just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted
irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its
northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple
pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three
smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots,
and beyond these, beginning 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 of
misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and
itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite
upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up
behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the
crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them,
to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the
great city, where it magnified 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 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;[136] 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,"[137]
struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty
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 charm of a scene so beautiful and so
strange, as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being.
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