Plashing The Slippery Walls And Houses With The
Cleavings Of The Tide, As My Black Boat, Borne Upon It, Skimmed
Along The Streets.
Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast palaces, I
wandered on, from room to room, from aisle to aisle, through
labyrinths of rich altars, ancient monuments; decayed apartments
where the furniture, half awful, half grotesque, was mouldering
away.
Pictures were there, replete with such enduring beauty and
expression: with such passion, truth and power: that they seemed
so many young and fresh realities among a host of spectres. I
thought these, often intermingled with the old days of the city:
with its beauties, tyrants, captains, patriots, merchants,
counters, priests: nay, with its very stones, and bricks, and
public places; all of which lived again, about me, on the walls.
Then, coming down some marble staircase where the water lapped and
oozed against the lower steps, I passed into my boat again, and
went on in my dream.
Floating down narrow lanes, where carpenters, at work with plane
and chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving straight upon
the water, where it lay like weed, or ebbed away before me in a
tangled heap. Past open doors, decayed and rotten from long
steeping in the wet, through which some scanty patch of vine shone
green and bright, making unusual shadows on the pavement with its
trembling leaves. Past quays and terraces, where women, gracefully
veiled, were passing and repassing, and where idlers were reclining
in the sunshine, on flag-stones and on flights of steps.
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