Estimate its
secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense
and steady performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by
the cathedral clock; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on
all who have passed through the lonely square at their feet for
centuries, and on all who have seen them rising far away over the
wooded plain, or catching on their square masses the last rays of the
sunset, when the city at their feet was indicated only by the mist at
the bend of the river. And then let us quickly recollect that we are in
Venice, and land at the extremity of the Calla Lunga San Moise, which
may be considered as there answering to the secluded street that led us
to our English cathedral gateway.
We find ourselves in a paved alley, some seven feet wide where it is
widest, full of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant
salesmen,--a shriek in their beginning, and dying away into a kind of
brazen ringing, all the worse for its confinement between the high
houses of the passage along which we have to make our way. Over-head,
an inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies and
chimney flues, pushed out on brackets to save room, and arched windows
with projecting sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves here
and there where a fig-tree branch escapes over a lower wall from some
inner cortile, leading the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky high
over all.
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