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.  I walked through the arsenal of Venice, which comprehends the Navy Yard, an enormous structure, with ranges of broad lofty roofs supported by massive portions of wall, and spacious dock-yards;