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; the whole
large enough to build and fit out a navy for the British empire. The
pleasure-boats of Napoleon and his empress, and that of the present
Viceroy, are there: but the ships of war belonging to the republic have
mouldered away with the Bucentaur. I saw, however, two Austrian vessels,
the same which had conveyed the Polish exiles to New York, lying under
shelter in the docks, as if placed there to show who were the present
masters of the place. It was melancholy to wander through the vast
unoccupied spaces of this noble edifice, and to think what must have been
the riches, the power, the prosperity, and the hopes of Venice at the time
it was built, and what they are at the present moment. It seems almost
impossible that any thing should take place to arrest the ruin which is
gradually consuming this renowned city. Some writers have asserted that
the lagoons around it are annually growing shallower by the depositions of
earth brought down by streams from the land, that they must finally become
marshes, and that their consequent insalubrity will drive the inhabitants
from Venice. I do not know how this may be; but the other causes I have
mentioned seem likely to produce nearly the same effect. I remembered, as
these ideas passed through my mind, a passage in which one of the sacred
poets foretells the desertion and desolation of Tyre, "the city that made
itself glorious in the midst of the seas,"