LETTER XXXII.
VENICE—SCENES BY MOONLIGHT—THE CANALS—THE ARMENIAN ISLAND—THE ISLAND OF THE INSANE—IMPROVEMENTS MADE BY NAPOLEON—SHADED WALKS—PAVILION AND ARTIFICIAL HILL—ANTIDOTES TO SADNESS—PARTIES ON THE CANALS—NARROW STREETS AND SMALL BRIDGES—THE RIALTO—MERCHANTS AND IDLERS—SHELL-WORK AND JEWELRY—POETRY AND HISTORY—GENERAL VIEW OF THE CITY—THE FRIULI MOUNTAINS—THE SHORE OF ITALY—A SILENT PANORAMA—THE ADRIATIC—PROMENADERS AND SITTERS, ETC.
We stepped into the gondola to-night as the shadows of the moon began to be perceptible, with orders to Giuseppe to take us where he would. Abroad in a summer's moonlight in Venice, is a line that might never be written but as the scene of a play. You can not miss pleasure. If it were only the tracking silently and swiftly the bosom of the broader canals lying asleep like streets of molten silver between the marble palaces, or shooting into the dark shadows of the narrower, with the black spirit-like gondolas gliding past, or lying in the shelter of a low and not unoccupied balcony; or did you but loiter on in search of music, lying unperceived beneath the windows of a palace, and listening, half asleep, to the sound of the guitar and the song of the invisible player within; this, with the strange beauty of every building about you, and the loveliness of the magic lights and shadows, were enough to make a night of pleasure, even were no charm of personal adventure to be added to the enumeration.
We glided along under the Rialto, talking of Belvidera, and Othello, and Shylock, and, entering a cross canal, cut the arched shadow of the Bridge of Sighs, hanging like a cobweb in the air, and shot in a moment forth to the full, ample, moonlit bosom of the Giudecca. This is the canal that makes the harbor and washes the stairs of San Marc. The Lido lay off at a mile's distance across the water, and, with the moon riding over it, the bay between us as still as the sky above, and brighter, it looked like a long cloud pencilled like a landscape in the heavens. To the right lay the Armenian island, which Lord Byron visited so often, to study with the fathers at the convent; and, a little nearer the island of the Insane—spite of its misery, asleep, with a most heavenly calmness on the sea. You remember the touching story of the crazed girl, who was sent here with a broken heart, described as putting her hand through the grating at the dash of every passing gondola, with her unvarying and affecting "Venite per me? Venite per me?"
At a corner of the harbor, some three quarters of a mile from San Marc, lies an island once occupied by a convent. Napoleon rased the buildings, and connecting it with the town by a new, handsome street and a bridge, laid out the ground as a public garden. We debarked at the stairs, and passed an hour in strolling through shaded walks, filled with the gay Venetians, who come to enjoy here what they find nowhere else, the smell of grass and green leaves. There is a pavilion upon an artificial hill in the centre, where the best lemonades and ices of Venice are to be found; and it was surrounded to-night by merry groups, amusing themselves with all the heart-cheering gayety of this delightful people. The very sight of them is an antidote to sadness.
In returning to San Marc a large gondola crossed us, filled with ladies and gentlemen, and followed by another with a band of music. This is a common mode of making a party on the canals, and a more agreeable one never was imagined. We ordered the gondolier to follow at a certain distance, and spent an hour or two just keeping within the softened sound of the instruments. How romantic are the veriest, every-day occurrences of this enchanting city.
We have strolled to-day through most of the narrow streets between the Rialto and the San Marc. They are, more properly, alleys. You wind through them at sharp angles, turning constantly, from the interruption of the canals, and crossing the small bridges at every twenty yards. They are dark and cool; and no hoof of any description ever passing through them, the marble flags are always smooth and clean; and with the singular silence, only broken by the shuffling of feet, they are pleasant places to loiter in at noon-day, when the canals are sunny.
We spent a half hour on the Rialto. This is the only bridge across the grand canal, and connects the two main parts of the city. It is, as you see by engravings, a noble span of a single arch, built of pure white marble. You pass it, ascending the arch by a long flight of steps to the apex, and descending again to the opposite side. It is very broad, the centre forming a street, with shops on each side, with alleys outside these, next the parapet, usually occupied by idlers or merchants, probably very much as in the time of Shylock. Here are exposed the cases of shell-work and jewelry for which Venice is famous. The variety and cheapness of these articles are surprising. The Rialto has always been to me, as it is probably to most others, quite the core of romantic locality. I stopped on the upper stair of the arch, and passed my hand across my eyes to recall my idea of it, and realize that I was there. One is disappointed, spite of all the common sense in the world, not to meet Shylock and Antonio and Pierre.
"Shylock and the Moor
And Pierre cannot be swept or worn away,"
says Childe Harold; and that, indeed, is the feeling everywhere in these romantic countries. You cannot separate them from the characters with which poetry or history once peopled them.
At sunset we mounted into the tower of San Marc, to get a general view of the city. The gold-dust atmosphere, so common in Italy at this hour, was all over the broad lagunes and the far stretching city; and she lay beneath us, in the midst of a sea of light, an island far out into the ocean, crowned with towers and churches, and heaped up with all the splendors of architecture. The Friuli mountains rose in the north with the deep blue dyes of distance, breaking up the else level horizon; the shore of Italy lay like a low line-cloud in the west; the spot where the Brenta empties into the sea glowing in the blaze of the sunset. About us lay the smaller islands, the suburbs of the sea-city, and all among them, and up and down the Giudecca, and away off in the lagunes, were sprinkled the thousand gondolas, meeting and crossing in one continued and silent panorama. The Lido, with its long wall hemmed in the bay, and beyond this lay the wide Adriatic. The floor of San Marc's vast square was beneath, dotted over its many-colored marbles with promenaders, its cafés swarmed by the sitters outside, and its long arcades thronged. One of my pleasantest hours in Venice was passed here.