Seem fading fast away
From human thoughts and purposes,
To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees.’
Here Ariosto lived—here Tasso occupied first a palace, and then a dungeon. Verona has even a more sounding name; boasts a finer situation, and contains the tomb of Juliet. But the same tender melancholy grace does not hang upon its walls, nor hover round its precincts as round those of Ferrara, inviting to endless leisure and pensive musing. Ferrara, while it was an independent state, was a flourishing and wealthy city, and contained 70,000 inhabitants; but from the time it fell into the hands of the Popes, in 1597, it declined, and it has now little more than an historical and poetical being.
From Ferrara we proceeded through Rovigo to Padua the Learned, where we were more fortunate in our inn, and where, in the fine open square at the entrance, I first perceived the rage for vulgar and flaunting statuary, which distinguishes the Lombardo-Venetian States. The traveller to Venice (who goes there to see the masterpieces of Titian or Palladio’s admired designs), runs the gauntlet all the way along at every town or villa he passes, of the most clumsy, affected, paltry, sprawling figures, cut in stone, that ever disgraced the chisel. Even their crucifixes and common Madonnas are in bad taste and proportion. This inaptitude for the representation of forms in a people, whose eye for colours transcended that of all the world besides, is striking as it is curious: and it would be worth the study of a man’s whole life to give a true and satisfactory solution of the mystery. Padua, though one of the oldest towns in Italy, is still a place of some resort and bustle; among other causes, from the number of Venetian families who are in the habit of spending the summer months there. Soon after leaving it, you begin to cross the canals and rivers which intersect this part of the country bordering upon the sea, and for some miles you follow the course of the Brenta along a flat, dusty, and unprofitable road. This is a period of considerable and painful suspense, till you arrive at Fusina, where you are put into a boat and rowed down one of the Lagunes, where over banks of high rank grass and reeds, and between solitary sentry-boxes at different intervals, you see Venice rising from the sea. For an hour and a half, that it takes you to cross from the last point of land to this Spouse of the Adriatic, its long line of spires, towers, churches, wharfs is stretched along the water’s edge, and you view it with a mixture of awe and incredulity. A city built in the air would be something still more wonderful; but any other must yield the palm to this for singularity and imposing effect. If it were on the firm land, it would rank as one of the first cities in Europe for magnificence, size, and beauty; as it is, it is without a rival. I do not know what Lord Byron and Lady Morgan could mean by quarrelling about the question who first called Venice ‘the Rome of the sea’—since it is perfectly unique in its kind. If a parallel must be found for it, it is more like Genoa shoved into the sea. Genoa stands on the sea, this in it. The effect is certainly magical, dazzling, perplexing. You feel at first a little giddy: you are not quite sure of your footing as on the deck of a vessel. You enter its narrow, cheerful canals, and find that instead of their being scooped out of the earth, you are gliding amidst rows of palaces and under broad-arched bridges, piled on the sea-green wave. You begin to think that you must cut your liquid way in this manner through the whole city, and use oars instead of feet. You land, and visit quays, squares, market-places, theatres, churches, halls, palaces; ascend tall towers, and stroll through shady gardens, without being once reminded that you are not on terra firma. The early inhabitants of this side of Italy, driven by Attila and his hordes of Huns from the land, sought shelter in the sea, built there for safety and liberty, laid the first foundations of Venice in the rippling wave, and commerce, wealth, luxury, arts, and crimson conquest crowned the growing Republic;—
‘And Ocean smil’d,
Well pleased to see his wondrous child.’
Man, proud of his amphibious creation, spared no pains to aggrandize and embellish it, even to extravagance and excess. The piles and blocks of wood on which it stands are brought from the huge forests at Treviso and Cadore: the stones that girt its circumference, and prop its walls, are dug from the mountains of Istria and Dalmatia: the marbles that inlay its palace-floors are hewn from the quarries near Verona. Venice is loaded with ornament, like a rich city-heiress with jewels. It seems the natural order of things. Her origin was a wonder: her end is to surprise. The strong, implanted tendency of her genius must be to the showy, the singular, the fantastic. Herself an anomaly, she reconciles contradictions, liberty with aristocracy, commerce with nobility, the want of titles with the pride of birth and heraldry. A violent birth in nature, she lays greedy, perhaps ill-advised, hands on all the artificial advantages that can supply her original defects. Use turns to gaudy beauty; extreme hardship to intemperance in pleasure. From the level uniform expanse that forever encircles her, she would obviously affect the aspiring in forms, the quaint, the complicated, relief and projection. The richness and foppery of her architecture arise from this: its stability and excellence probably from another circumstance counteracting this tendency to the buoyant and fluttering, viz., the necessity of raising solid edifices on such slippery foundations, and of not playing tricks with stone-walls upon the water. Her eye for colours and costume she would bring with conquest from the East. The spirit, intelligence, and activity of her men, she would derive from their ancestors: the grace, the glowing animation and bounding step of her women, from the sun and mountain-breeze! The want of simplicity and severity in Venetian taste seems owing to this, that all here is factitious and the work of art: redundancy again is an attribute of commerce, whose eye is gross and large, and does not admit of the too much; and as to irregularity and want of fixed principles, we may account by analogy at least for these, from that element of which Venice is the nominal bride, to which she owes her all, and the very essence of which is caprice, uncertainty, and vicissitude!
‘And now from out the watery floor