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the great city that still extends itself in the distance, and the walls and towers from the islands that are near; and so wait, until the bright investiture and sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning cry; and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into the horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen by man for his habitation.

They little thought, who first drove the stakes into the sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, that their children were to be the princes of that ocean, and their palaces its pride; and yet, in the great natural laws that rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be remembered what strange preparation had been made for the things which no human imagination could have foretold, and how the whole existence and fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or compelled, by the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the sea. Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been no tide, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water-access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible: even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without setting foot upon the lower and slippery steps; and the highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, and overflow the entrance halls. Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood and ebb would have

rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire system of water-carriage for the higher classes, in their easy and daily intercourse, must have been done away with. The streets of the city would have been widened, its network of canals filled up, and all the peculiar character of the place and the people destroyed.

The reader may, perhaps, have felt some pain in the contrast between this faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the romantic conception of it which we ordinarily form; but this pain, if he have felt it, ought to be more than counterbalanced by the value of the instance thus afforded to us at once of the inscrutableness and the wisdom of the ways of God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among their shallows, there was indeed a preparation, and the only preparation possible, for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in the worldwide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude and Splendour.

JOHN RUSKIN.

SUNSET IN NORTHERN ITALY.

THE moon is up, and yet it is not night—
Sunset divides the sky with her—a sea
Of glory streams along the Alpine height

Of blue Friuli's mountains; Heaven is free
From clouds, but of all colours seems to be
Melted to one vast Iris of the west,

Where the day joins the past eternity;

While, on the other hand, meek Dian's crest Floats through the azure air—an island of the blest!

A single star is at her side, and reigns

With her o'er half the lovely heaven; but stili Yon sunny sea heaves brightly, and remains Rolled o'er the peak of the far Rhætian hill, As Day and Night contending were, until Nature reclaimed her order :-gently flows The deep-eyed Brenta, where their hues instil The odorous purple of a new-born rose,

Which streams upon her stream, and glassed within it glows,

Filled with the face of heaven, which, from afar,

Comes down upon the waters; all its hues,

From the rich sunset to the rising star,

Their magical variety diffuse :

And now they change; a paler shadow strews
Its mantle o'er the mountains; parting day
Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues
With a new colour, as it gasps away,

The last still loveliest, till-'tis gone--and all is grey.

LORD BYRON.

LONDON FROM THE DOME OF ST. PAUL'S. laid fairly

HAVING climbed to the summit of the dome, I saw, at my feet, all of London that the smoke and the weather permitted to come into sight. But though a finer morning might have presented me with a more extensive and more richly-coloured prospect, it would scarce have given me one equally striking. I stood over the middle of a vast seething cauldron, and looked down through the blue reek on the dim, indistinct forms that seemed parboiling within. The denser clouds were rolling away, but their huge volumes still lay folded all around on the outskirts of the prospect. I could see a long reach of the river, with its gigantic bridges striding across; but both ends of the tide, like those of the stream seen by Mirza, were enveloped in darkness; and the bridges, grey and unsolid-looking themselves, as if cut out of sheets of compressed vapour, seemed leading to a spectral city.

Immediately in the foreground there lay a perplexed labyrinth of streets and lanes, and untraceable ranges of buildings, that seemed the huddled-up fragments of a fractured puzzle— difficult enough of resolution when entire, and rendered altogether unresolvable by the chance that had broken it. As the scene receded, only the larger and more prominent objects came into view-here a spire, and there a monument, and yonder a square Gothic tower; and as it still farther receded, I could see but the dim fragments of things-bits of churches inwrought into the cloud, and the insulated pediments and columned fronts of public buildings sketched off in diluted grey. I was reminded of Sir Walter Scott's recipe for painting a battle: a great cloud to be got up as the first part of the process; and as the second, here and there an arm or a leg stuck in, and here and there a head or a body. And such was London, the greatest city of the world as I looked upon it this morning, for the first time, from the golden gallery of St. Paul's.

The hour of noon struck on the great bell far below my feet; the pigmies in the thoroughfare of St. Paul's Yard, still farther below, were evidently increasing in number and gathering into groups; I could see faces that seemed no bigger than fists thickening in the windows, and dim little figures starting up on the leads of houses; and then, issuing into the Yard from one of the streets, there came a long line of gay coaches, with the identical coach in the midst, all gorgeous and grand, that I remembered to have seen done in Dutch gold, full five-and-thirty years before, on the covers of a splendid sixpenny edition of Whittington and his Cat. Hurrah for Whittington, Lord Mayor of London! Without having once bargained for such a thing—all unaware of what was awaiting me-I had ascended St. Paul's to see, as it proved, the Lord Mayor's procession. To be sure, I was placed rather high for witnessing with the right feeling the gauds and the grandeurs. All human greatness requires to be set in a peculiar light, and does not come out to advantage when seen from either too near or too distant a point of view. Slowly the pageant passed on and away; the groups dispersed in the streets, the faces evanished from the windows, the figures disappeared from the house-tops; the entire apparition and its accompaniments melted into thin air, like the vision seen in the midst of the hollow valley of Bagdad; and I saw but the dim city parboiling amid the clouds, and the long leaden-coloured reach of the river bounding half the world of London, as the monstrous ocean snake of the Edda more than half encircles the globe.

HUGH MILLER.

ON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE.

EARTH has not anything to show more fair :
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:

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