In Julian and Maddalo, written in 1818, Shelley tells us how he—
“ ... rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of sand which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes,
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down.
This ride was my delight.”
The Lido, of course, is here referred to. Later, in the same poem, he says:
“Servants announced the gondola, and we
Through the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea
Sailed to the island where the mad-house stands.”
Elsewhere he speaks of “ocean’s nurseling, Venice”; but he never states where he lodged in Venice during any of his brief visits here.
Scott arrived in Venice on the 19th of May, 1832, and he remained here until the 23d. His biographer says that he showed no curiosity about anything but the Bridge of Sighs and the adjoining dungeons, down into which latter he would scramble, though the exertion was exceedingly painful to him. It is not recorded where he lodged here, and he went slowly and sadly home to die.
George Sand and Alfred de Musset spent a number of months, in 1833-34, at the Hotel Danieli, and there De Musset was very ill of a brain-fever, caused, according to the story of old residents, by Mme. Dudevant’s desertion of him, although other, and perhaps better, authorities declare that she never left his bedside until he was pronounced out of danger. All statements agree, however, that she was not with him when his brother came for him, in the spring of 1834, and carried him back to Paris.
James Fenimore Cooper, on his arrival here in 1838, “spent a day or two at the Hotel Leone Bianco, on the northwest side of the Square”; but later he “took apartments near the Palazzo, where he set up his own gondola.” He did what we all do on our first visit to Venice; but his conclusions are so unlike those of most of us that they are worth recording. “Although Venice was attractive at first,” he says, “in the absence of acquaintances it became monotonous and wearying. A town in which the sound of wheels and hoofs is never known, in which the stillness of the narrow, ravine-like canals is seldom broken, unless by the fall of an oar or the cry of a gondolier, fatigues one by its unceasing calm. I do not remember to have been so much struck with any place on entering it. I do not recollect ever to have been so soon tired of a residence in a capital.”
The very absence of the noise of hoof and wheel, the very silence of which he complains, are, to most tired-minded travellers, the greatest of the charms of the capital city of Venice. But happily we each have our own points of view.
Dickens came first to Venice in 1844, when he wrote to Forster: “Here I sit in the sober solitude of a famous inn, with the great bell of St. Mark ringing twelve at my elbow; with three arched windows in my room (two stones high) looking down upon the Grand Canal, and away, beyond, to where the sun went down to-night in a blaze.” He did not tell the name of the famous inn; but it sounds like Hotel Danieli. Elsewhere he said to the same correspondent: “My Dear Fellow—Nothing in the world that you have ever heard of Venice is equal to the magnificent and stupendous reality; the wildest visions of The Arabian Nights are nothing to the Piazza of St. Mark, and the first impression of the inside of the Church. The gorgeous and wonderful reality of Venice is beyond the fancy of the wildest dreamer. Opium couldn’t build such a place, and enchantment couldn’t shadow it forth in vision.” In 1853 he wrote to Forster: “We live in the same house I lived in nine years ago, and have the same sitting-room—close to the Bridge of Sighs and the Palace of the Doges. The room is at the corner of the house, and there is a narrow street of water running round the side.” Again, no doubt, Hotel Danieli.