Venetian Life | Page 9

florin too much.
So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that complex
spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most alluring
glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any fragment
of her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had been
penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had been
touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my arrival
need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I would

not wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and alien
to the place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the first. I
believe it was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the beautiful
that I here found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full of society and
friendship, speaking a language which, even in its unfamiliar forms, I
could partly understand, and at once making me citizen of that Venice
from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in the presence of the
great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt at home--indeed, I
could as yet understand their excellence and grandeur only very
imperfectly--but wherever I wandered through the quaint and
marvelous city, I found the good company of
"The fair, the old;"
and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and I learned
to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of relief.
My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some
purpose or destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the
narrowest, crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world,
or left me cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as
possible from the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in
wait for my blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and
brought to surrender by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the
sudden brinks of canals. The wide and open squares before the
innumerable churches of the city were equally victorious, and
continually took me prisoner. But all places had something rare and
worthy to be seen: if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture, at least
interesting squalor and picturesque wretchedness: and I believe I had
less delight in proper Objects of Interest than in the dirty
neighborhoods that reeked with unwholesome winter damps below, and
peered curiously out with frowzy heads and beautiful eyes from the
high, heavy-shuttered casements above. Every court had its carven well
to show me, in the noisy keeping of the water-carriers and the slatternly,
statuesque gossips of the place. The remote and noisome canals were
pathetic with empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that

decorated the sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and
patched the lofty windows with obsolete hats.
I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
the brilliancy of St. Mark's and the glittering streets of shops that
branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little oil-
lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines of
the Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole
means of street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure,
and deepening the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent
arches. I remember distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time,
the soft night of late winter which first showed me the scene you may
behold from the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of
the Riva degli Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of
the Gardens, I turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent
islands in the east (a solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the
water, and striking its moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and
glanced athwart the vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw
all the lights from the Piazzetta to the Giudecca, making a crescent of
flame in the air, and casting deep into the water under them a crimson
glory that sank also down and down in my own heart, and illumined all
its memories of beauty and delight. Behind these lamps rose the
shadowy masses of church and palace; the moon stood bright and full
in the heavens; the