"No tooth-powder, no letters, no recent tidings of you.
"Mr. Lewis is at Venice, and I am going up to stay a week with him there—as it is one of his enthusiasms also to like the city.
"I stood in Venice on the 'Bridge of Sighs,' &c. &c.
"The 'Bridge of Sighs' (i.e. Ponte de'i Sospiri) is that which divides, or rather joins, the palace of the Doge to the prison of the state. It has two passages: the criminal went by the one to judgment, and returned by the other to death, being strangled in a chamber adjoining, where there was a mechanical process for the purpose.
"This is the first stanza of our new Canto; and now for a line of the second:—
"In Venice, Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier,
Her palaces, &c. &c.
"You know that formerly the gondoliers sung always, and Tasso's Gierusalemme was their ballad. Venice is built on seventy-two islands.
"There! there's a brick of your new Babel! and now, sirrah! what say you to the sample?
"Yours, &c.
"P.S. I shall write again by and by."