The remains of _their_ Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous
masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in
many a grass-grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal,
where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred
years, and must soon prevail over them for ever. It must be our task to
glean and gather them forth, and restore out of them some faint image
of the lost city; more gorgeous 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 man, so that
its wonderfulness cannot be grasped by the indolence of imagination,
but only after frank inquiry into the true nature of that wild and
solitary scene, whose restless tides and trembling 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 is more likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping loop
formed by the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and enclosing 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.
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