On June 19, he thus moralizes:  “The Piazza of St. Mark is the great place of resort, and on every evening, but especially on Sundays or festas, the arcades and cafes are crowded with elegantly dressed females and their gallants.  Chairs are placed in great numbers under the awnings before the cafes.  A people that have no homes, who are deprived from policy of that domestic and social intercourse which we enjoy, must have recourse to this empty, heartless enjoyment; an indolent enjoyment, when all their intercourse, too, is in public, surrounded by police agents and soldiers to prevent excess.  Hallam, in his ‘Middle Ages,’ has this just reflection on the condition of this same city when under the Council of Ten:  ’But how much more honorable are the wildest excesses of faction than the stillness and moral degradation of servitude.’  Quiet is, indeed, obtained here, but at what immense expense!  Expense of wealth, although excessive, is nothing compared with the expense of morality and of all intellectual exercise.”

On June 23, he witnessed another thunderstorm from the Piazza of St. Mark:—­

“The lightning, flashing in the dark clouds that were gathering from the Tyrolese Alps, portended another storm which soon burst over us and hastened the conclusion of the music.  The lightning was incessant.  I stood at the corner of the piazza and watched the splendid effects of lights and darks, in a moment coming and in a moment gone, on the campanile and church of St. Mark’s.  It was most sublime.  The gilt statue of the angel on the top of the campanile never looked so sublime, seeming to be enveloped in the glory of the vivid light, and, as the electric fluid flashed behind it from cloud to cloud incessantly, it seemed to go and come at the bidding of the angel.”

This sounds almost like a prophetic vision, written by the pencil of the man who, in a few years from then, was to make the lightning go and come at his bidding.

“July 4. This anniversary of the day of our national birth found but two Americans in Venice.  We met in the evening over a cup of coffee and thought and talked of the happiest of countries.  We had no patriotic toasts, but the sentiments of our hearts were—­’Peace be within thy walls and prosperity within thy palaces.’  Never on any anniversary of our Independence have I felt so strongly the great reason I have for gratitude in having been born in such a country.  When I think of the innumerable blessings we enjoy over every other country in the world, I am constrained to praise God who hath made us to differ, for ’He hath not dealt so with any nation, and as for his judgments, we have not known them.’  While pestilence and famine and war surround me here in these devoted countries, I fix my thoughts on one bright spot on earth; truly (if our too ungrateful countrymen would but see it), truly a terrestrial paradise.”