"Perhaps it would be difficult to conceive any thing more abhorrent to the soul and body of man, than the time, manner, and place, of death, distinguishing those executions which have rendered the gulfs of the Canal Orfano immemorably infamous.
"To me, the element, in its most serene and smiling state, wears a look of furtive menace; and I am free to confess, that even when gliding on a mid-summer night over that sweetest Lake of Derwentwater, beneath the shadows of its moonlit isles and fair pavilions, I have not been without a certain sensation of uncomfortable awe. But what must have been the feelings of the victim, whether criminal or innocent, who, from this accurst Maranna, cast around him his last straining look of agony, and uttered his last cry of supplication or despair! The conviction that his family, parent, wife, or son, were at that hour of horror in profound ignorance sometimes of his very absence, often of its cause, or at least, only perplexed with conjecture, and always unconscious of its horrible event, must have constituted no trifling pang in that mortal hour. Then that old familiar, though melancholy, water, more terrible to his feelings than the dreariest wilderness of ocean! For, girdling the dusky horizon, could he not see the domes and campaniles of Venice, perhaps the very lamps in his own palace windows, from whose festal saloons he had just been decoyed; just distant enough to be beyond the reach of help? but too, too near for that despairing gaze that recognized and bade adieu for ever at the same glance? There too were not those nestling lovely islands, each with its convent tower gleaming to the moon, and from which the sonorous bells were tolling, the sacred Anthems swelling for the last time on his ear! Alas! those chaunted masses were not for his conflicting soul; yea, it would have a strange comfort to feel that passing bell was proclaiming to the world that his spirit was parting from its scarcely worn weeds! But no! even that miserable solace was prohibited to him; he was to be obliterated from society, and his inexorable judges had decreed that society was not to know that he was gone. No grave for his dust; no monument for his name, to palliate his faults and perpetuate his virtues. The ghastly element that moaned and shuddered under the Gondola, as if remorseful for its own involuntary cruelties, was to spread its weltering pall over his hearseless bones."
The Bells of Venice.
"The islands constituting the Venetian Archipelago are about fifty in number, of various size and extremely picturesque. They were each of them the seat of a monastery or nunnery, till Napoleon came, who overthrew these saintly receptacles, converting them into forts, mills, public gardens, &c. In short, these islands are among the most beautiful contingents of this magic scene. Each has its graceful campanile, and its various structures of castle, convent, mill, or summer-house; each its due girdle of blue sea, fenced by walls that rise round its margent, and embroidered with groves and arbours of the most delightful green.
"This evening I cruised past many of them in my gondola after sunset; and was particularly struck with the beauty of the large Isle of Murano, and its attendant San Michaele (the latter one entire cemetery,) whose thin tall campaniles throw up their slender figures in fine relief against the long wavy purple of the Acharnean Hills in the west, at the head of the Adriatic.
"Night gathered round, as we floated under that prodigious monument of the departed majesty of the Republic, the arsenal, whose ramparts high and endless, and as ugly as either, lay weltering many a rood upon their wooden piles. Every bell in the city was tolling for Nones, and sang aloud to the surrounding islands, whose campaniles replied with sympathetic thunder, a solemn diapason of Corybantine brass, to my taste, wonderfully in unison with the funeral mole of the defunct Arsenal, the repose of the purple mountains, and the fainting splendour of that twinned vault and pavement, the opal sea and sky, smooth, soft, and bright enough for Juno and Amphitrite to hold a gossip, each from her own imperial element.
"Probably it is to the peculiarity of its situation, that one may attribute the sweetly solemn melodies produced by the bells of Venice. Flinging their prolonged notes down those immense hollows of architecture, sweeping round their narrow streets, and floating over their liquid pavement, they derive every advantage from that element which always so fondly detains and dallies with music, in addition to the depth and power with which they are endowed, by those pillared and winding concaves, that, like the tubes of some vast organ, receive and redouble the airy strain.
"Whatever be the case, I never felt any thing so fully coming up to my idea, of 'most musical, most melancholy.'"
We bid Mr Whyte adieu, in the hope that, if a second edition of these volumes be called for, he will subject them to a very thorough revision—connecting together many passages, which, though relating to the same subject, are at present unnaturally disjoined—omitting much, which, instead of heightening, interferes with the effect which it is his object to produce—and, above all, eschewing the indulgence of pleasantries which certainly produces no corresponding impression on his readers.