The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast between this
faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the romantic
conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he have
felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the
instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the
wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been
permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid
rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh
waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little
could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were
shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their
desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than
of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the
glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all
the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which
were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks, and
feeding the bitter grass among their shallows, there was indeed a
preparation, and _the only preparation possible_, for the founding of a
city which was to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the
earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges, and
to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in
world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from the
burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendour.
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