He Passes,
You Know, For One Of The Richest Potentates In Europe.
Letter VI.
Venice. - The Tyrol.
Munich, _August_ 6, 1835.
Since my last letter I have visited Venice, a city which realizes the old
mythological fable of beauty born of the sea. I must confess, however,
that my first feeling on entering it was that of disappointment. As we
passed in our gondola out of the lagoons, up one of the numerous canals,
which, permeate the city in every direction in such a manner that it seems
as if you could only pass your time either within doors or in a boat, the
place appeared to me a vast assemblage of prisons surrounded with their
moats, and I thought how weary I should soon grow of my island prison, and
how glad to escape again to the main-land. But this feeling quickly gave
way to delight and admiration, when I landed and surveyed the clean though
narrow streets, never incommoded by dust nor disturbed by the noise and
jostling of carriages and horses, by which you may pass to every part of
the city - when I looked again at the rows of superb buildings, with their
marble steps ascending out of the water of the canals, in which the
gondolas were shooting by each other - when I stood in the immense square
of St. Mark, surrounded by palaces resting on arcades, under which the
shops rival in splendor those of Paris, and crowds of the gay inhabitants
of both sexes assemble towards evening and sit in groups before the doors
of the coffee-houses - and when I gazed on the barbaric magnificence of the
church of St. Mark and the Doge's palace, surrounded by the old emblems of
the power of Venice, and overlooking the Adriatic, once the empire of the
republic. The architecture of Venice has to my eyes, something watery and
oceanic in its aspect. Under the hands of Palladio, the Grecian orders
seemed to borrow the lightness and airiness of the Gothic. As you look at
the numerous windows and the multitude of columns which give a striated
appearance to the fronts of the palaces, you think of stalactites and
icicles, such as you might imagine to ornament the abodes of the
water-gods and sea-nymphs. The only thing needed to complete the poetic
illusion is transparency or brilliancy of color, and this is wholly
wanting; for at Venice the whitest marble is soon clouded and blackened by
the corrosion of the sea-air.
It is not my intention, however, to do so hackneyed a thing as to give a
description of Venice. One thing, I must confess, seemed to me
extraordinary: how this city, deprived as it is of the commerce which
built it up from the shallows of the Adriatic, and upheld it so long and
so proudly, should not have decayed even more rapidly than it has done.
Trieste has drawn from it almost all its trade, and flourishes by its
decline.
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