In leaving Florence I seemed to be leaving home; on reaching Venice I seemed only on a visit, and so I felt as long as I was there. So striking is this city, that all who reach it determine to remain for a length of time; but it palls upon them, and a fortnight is generally the limit of their stay.
But it is always great in memory.
Venice! One sits in peaceful repose, no sound of voices, or wheels, or hoofs, in the Piazza San Marco, over coffee, which the place turns to nectar. One swallows with insatiate mental appetite the Duomo; and what a breakfast it is for hungry eyes! One walks round the palace of those Doges, more majestic than man ever was or can ever be; a prison on the right side for the commission of cruel sins, a cathedral round the corner for their pardon, and that even up to plenary indulgence.
What a curious thing it is not to be at home, but how most curious of all it is to be at Venice! Would you know what it is to be there, imagine such a town as Brighton, with all the streets filled with water and changed to canals, with little bridges everywhere to enable you to cross from one side of the way to the other! Then, to turn the sea into a Grand Canal, imagine a row of palaces outside the piers, from Hove to Kemptown, and you are at Venice!
I walked all over Venice, where walking was possible: down calle, or lanes, with opposite houses so near to each other that a good harlequin might turn a somersault across from one window to another!
Edmund Kean would have done this, though the windows were closed.
One gets from calle to calle over the daintiest little bridges, some of white chiselled marble; from these you look up and down a canal between towering houses, and here and there see a family keep its gondola, as some of us at home keep our carriage. There the gondolas are tethered to the house steps, as our horses are to the manger.
When there is no more walking possible, one takes to a gondola at the Piazzetta, which sweeps by palaces of loveliest architecture on both sides of the Grand Canal. A sort of Thames, down stream, reaches the Rialto bridge, not built so early as Shakespeare’s time; still, there was a bank of that name, Riva Alto, where the merchants of Venice met, close by; but it is a scanty spot, and little suited to business transactions.
At the Rialto one gets out of the gondola and crosses the bridge. It has paltry shops on either side, that might have been stocked from the vast surplus of Manchester or Birmingham. One returns to one’s gondola, ready to drop a mean opinion, and resume one’s sense of beauty. “What palace is this, O songless Signor Gondolier?” “The General Post Office, signor,” answers the gondolier. We glide to and fro, we pause before the Fondaco dei Turchi, and look at it until we feel that its beauty can never be erased from our mental vision.