There is perhaps no more beautiful row in Venice than, as the sunset begins in September days, to take the gondola out of the mouth of the Giudecca and make our winding way to St. George of the Seaweed, set lovely in the lonely waters that look towards the Euganean Hills. Around it lie the shallower sea-marshes near the mainland, and when the gold of the sunset strikes them, they flame like emerald beds of fire. The tower of the island church used to rise, thin and black, with two upper windows through which the sun poured two shafts of light, against the south-western glow—a beacon seen far and wide, a memorial tower that in its silence held a thousand thoughts. It is now destroyed. It was not in the way; it might have been kept for the sake of beauty by a few clamps; but this was too much for modern Venice. I resented its departure bitterly. One consolation remained. When the boat drew near the angle of the island, there stood, and still stands, set high on the angle of the wall, an image of the Virgin, rudely carved, but with grave simplicity and faith. She held her son in her arms. On her head was an iron crown, engrailed, and over her head an iron umbrella with a fringe of beaten iron. She looked towards Venice with blessing and protection, and claimed her right in Venice. She was a Virgin for the people and of the people, a gentle, lowly born, working woman, with a face of sorrow and strength, such as we may see every day in the small squares of Venice when the people gather round the well. And yet there was such nobility, love, motherhood, and so much sweet spirit in her air, so much of watching to protect and guard the sea and its fisher-folk, that I cried when I saw her first, and afterwards in my soul when I passed her, Ave Maria, Maris Stella!
There is somewhere another Virgin on another island, with also her lamp at night and her canopy, but I forget where she stands. Wherever she is, she is the same benign and lonely person, the Madonna Protectrix of the sailor and the lagoon.
The row home from this island as the sun descends to its rest on autumn evenings, is of an extraordinary splendour and beauty. The little wavelets of the lagoon are ebony in shade and blazing gold on the side where the light falls. The sea-banks turn a golden brown, and their grasses seem to change into the warm green of the deep sea. The sky drops from liquid and pellucid blue to pearl, and then to orange, crimson and gold. The wild lights fall on the city which grows slowly on the eyes, and every tower is a tower of fire. And behind, beyond St. George of the Seaweed, but towards the left, are the triangled Euganean Hills, down the sides of the greatest of which I have often seen the sun roll like a wheel, such a wheel as Ezekiel saw in vision. Shelley saw them at this sunset hour.
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,
As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles,
The likeness of a clump of peakèd isles—
And then—as if the Earth and Sea had been
Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen
Those mountains towering as from waves of flame
Around the vaporous sun, from which there came