"Of course a thousand imaginations and memories hunt each other through one's head and heart in such a place and at such an hour as this, but to-night there were realities, which, where they do not dispel, must always reinforce such phantasies.
"Before the steps of the great cross in the centre, garnished with all the emblems of the passion, knelt a respectably dressed group, apparently father, mother, and daughter, absorbed in a rapture of devotion. The lamps were lighted before the fourteen shrines, which Benedict the Fourteenth erected around the arena, and flung a dusky light upon the successive stagioni of our Saviour's sufferings, by which each is distinguished; and we saw a solitary peasant, in the dark costume of his country, evidently faint and toil-worn, rise from his oraisons at one shrine, only to sink upon his knees before another.
"Ah! it was at once a simple and sagacious stroke of that priestly sovereign, who, in these prophaned ruins, planted the Cross, and, by a mightier spell than the magician's wand, arrested the rapacity of its patrician plunderers!"
Do not sketches such as these revive for us all those feelings which Rome awakened in ourselves, bringing back the clime, the sky, the loneliness, the mingled feeling of grandeur and situation—the gentle melancholy with which the eternal city impresses even the least imaginative mind? To us they appear to embody more of the poetry of travel than many a work which figures under the mask of poesy.
How much has been written on Venice, from Schiller and Radcliffe to Madame de Staël and Madame Dudevant! and yet we hardly know if any one, with the exception of the last, has more completely imbued his mind with the peculiar spirit of Venice, or reflected its impressions with more truth than Mr Whyte. Schiller, indeed, and Mrs Radcliffe, had never witnessed the scenes they described; their portraiture is the result merely of reading and description, warmed and vivified by the glow of their own imagination. Hence the glimpses of Venice conveyed in Schiller's beautiful fragment of the Armenian, are mere general outlines—true enough so far as they go, but faintly drawn, and destitute, as we might say, of local colour. Mrs Radcliffe's moonlight landscapes—masques and music—exhibit with great beauty one aspect of the city, but only one.
Very different are the Venetian Sketches of Madame Dudevant. She has drunk in the inspiration of Venice on the spot, has penetrated the very heart of its mystery, and reproduces the impressions which an intimacy with its peculiarities produces, with a degree of truth, force, and poetical feeling, that impart the most captivating charm to her Venetian Letters. Mr Whyte's Fragments exhibit much of the same sensibility, the same just perception of the spirit of Venice; and though they have not that brilliancy of style which the pictures of the French authoress possess, there is often even in this respect great beauty both of thought and expression. Mr Whyte, indeed, took the right course to enable him thoroughly to understand and appreciate Venice. Instead of confining himself to the stately vision of the Grand Canal, or the wizard magnificence of St Mark's, he seems to have habitually traced all the lesser canals; the little Rii, which, like small veins, shoot off from the great arteries of the Grand Canal and the Giudecca, carrying the circulation of the Adriatic through this unique city; exploring their high, dark, and narrow recesses, pondering on the strange contrasts of misery and magnificence, squalid filth and luxurious ornament, which they present side by side; and heightening the impression thus created, by selecting all varieties of aspects, from the bright flashing sunshine pouring down into these dark chasms, as into a well, to the shadowy evening, the magic contrasts of moonlight, the gloom of wind and rain howling through the balconies, driving the ocean wave impetuously through these water-ways, and beating against their thousand bridges; or those thunder-storms—nowhere more magnificent than at Venice—where the gleam of the lightning forms so fearful a contrast with the Cimmerian gloom of the canal, and the peals are reverberated with such magnificence from those piles of masonry with which they are lined. There is, indeed, no spectacle that can be conceived, more impressive than some of these smaller canals, particularly if you enter them towards sundown. You glide into a gulf of buildings, rising high on each side—almost meeting above your head—most of them ruinous and dilapidated, sinking by piecemeal into the green element which they have displaced for centuries, but which, through the slow agency of the sap and mine, is visibly resuming his oozy empire. You pass some church with its unfinished marble face. Again, a set of poor rickety and mean edifices follow; when suddenly you come upon some pile of massy grandeur, looming gigantic in the twilight, in whose colossal, but beautiful proportions, you can trace the hand of Sammichele or Sansovino. You come nearer, and perceive the fretted windows broken, stuffed with rags, and patched with paper; rough boards nailed up against the gilded beams; grand portals, of which the doors have disappeared, allowing the eye to penetrate into a dark perspective within: perhaps a sign-board over-tops a glorious cornice of grim masks or armorial bearings; and from latticed windows, on which Palladio had lavished all the delicate beauty of his architecture, some flaunting and gaudy rags are hung out to dry. You enquire what is the building, and to whom it belongs, and you are answered: It is the palace of one of the classic nobility of ancient Venice—now tenanted by a Hebrew, who lets out the apartments at so many lire a month!
But let Mr Whyte speak for himself.
The Bridge of Sighs.
"The Canal Orfano, the Ponte di Sospiri! what a day to behold these long pictured images of darknes and terror, for the first time! Such a blaze of May sunshine, such a soothing repose broken by a few distant bells or the nearer laugh of the gay Gondoliers. I looked upon the narrow, immured waters under the Bridge of Sighs, then to the high arch that like the heavy embossed clasp of some old solemn book united its decorated Gothic Piles (those volumes of bloody Story) on either side, and instead of shuddering at inquisitions and racks, and Piombi and Pozzi, as in common decency I ought, away fled my intractable thoughts to merry England's old Sabbath Chimes, her village spires, village greens, village elm lanes, and decent peasantry.
"Yet those high and antique abodes of venerable crime, those wild barbaric piles, in which old age palliates and almost hallows infamy! giving it somewhat the same prescriptive sanctuary as Milton bestows on the Palace of his Pandemonium! That cruel slinking flood, the only firmament the stone vaulted pits below were conscious of! Each looked as malignant and dangerous as they could, beneath the triumph of such a glorious sun; that light to which their aspect once was hateful, and their deeds untold.