If I ascended in a captive balloon which broke loose, making me a prisoner, to undergo the sentence of transportation with hard-breathing in the cold, scant air; and if offered a ticket-of-leave and a parachute, with a choice of where I would descend, it would be in St. Mark’s Square, the sun shining, the band playing, the cup of hot coffee on the table just poured out. It is the only perfect square upon earth—no dust, no noisy cabs to run over your toes as you stretch out your legs on the smoothly paved ground.
Seated in the Piazza San Marco over coffee and cigar, one reflects how Venice has more than one Shakespearian interest: how the Rialto, now a bridge, was in our dramatist’s day a bank of the Grand Canal, the riva alto. But a yet greater interest attaches to the circumstance which led him wrong, yet right, in his not knowing that there were two Othello families, one of which was distinguished as Il Moro, the Mulberry, because they held estates in the Morea.
And this was Shakespeare’s Moor!
London is dusty, every other town is dusty; Venice is not. London registers a good one death per diem under cab wheels. In Venice a cab wheel is never seen; but whether the bicycle has reached it now I do not know.
I went one evening to the Malibran theatre, and on Sunday to the Fenice opera house. I had indulged my eyes to the full, so I gave my ears a turn, and they were gratified in hearing William Tell. I did not fail to visit the island of Lido in a steam ’bus to see the true Adriatic. The clean sands, whence no land is visible, is all that is to be seen there, though, as I did, you walk across from shore to shore.
I scarcely completed the traditional fortnight at Venice, but it was not my last visit there. What had I seen? It was like something colossal, though only human; it was like having turned over a huge book of wonderful pictures, leaf after leaf: the first an enchanted square, its mosque, its more than kingly palace, its obtrusive campanile; lastly, a wonderful line of arches, a mile long between Venice and the coast, along which glided a railway train.
When I had dwelt on every page of the volume and reached the end, I had no desire to begin again, but took the treasured-up remembrance of it across the Brenner.
Sleeping at Verona, I stayed there for a day that I might see the great fortress, which forms part of the quadrilateral, and also the Roman coliseum there, which is in a very perfect state. The town must have suffered much from time, even since Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen” left it to make the acquaintance of Sylvia. As I stood on the bridge and looked about me, the houses seemed to be crumbling before my very eyes. This done, I proceeded to Stassfurt, taking Munich on my way.
I remained for several months at Stassfurt, the summers in Germany always being for the most part fine. I made excursions with some of my family into the Harz, went up and round the mountains, spent a night on the Brocken, witnessed the sun rise from beneath my feet, and made a stay afterwards at Thale, ascending the picturesque heights from that locality. We took our route to the Harz by the weird Affenthaler valley, visiting the admirable old lordly castle of Falconstein on our way, and not for the last time. The sombre hills, the narrow pass, the pine forest on either side, the river, once seen can never but be recalled to mind again.
The Brocken is covered with huge masses of stone, evidently the work of a volcano. Other masses have been hurled downwards, rudely paving the pine-covered descent. I suggested that the scattered heaps on the summit should be piled up as a rude and lasting monument to Goethe.