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.
When the eye falls casually on a map of Europe, there is no feature by
which it is more likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping loop
formed by the junction of the Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the
great basin of Lombardy.
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