The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their own strength.  Those feelings, always as fruitless as they are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even of discerning, the objects to which they ought to have been attached.  The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust.  No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed that “Bridge of Sighs,” which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now passes with breathless interest:  the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as of one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero’s death; and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely altered in the course of the last three centuries that if Henry Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from his tomb, and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, that renowned entrance, the painter’s favorite subject, the novelist’s favorite scene, where the water first narrows by the steps of the Church of La Salute—­the mighty doges would not know in what spot of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the great city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been brought down with bitterness to the grave.

The remains of their Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-grown court and silent pathway and lightless canal, where the slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years, and must soon prevail over them forever.  It must be our task to glean and gather them forth, and restore out of them some faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous a thousandfold than that which now exists, yet not created in the day-dream of the prince nor by the ostentation of the noble, but built by iron hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity of nature and the fury of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be grasped by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank inquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene whose restless tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of the city, but long denied her dominion.