heavy, stone balconies, one above another, and tier over tier:
with here and there, one larger than the rest, towering high up--a
huge marble platform; the doorless vestibules, massively barred
lower windows, immense public staircases, thick marble pillars,
strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary, dreaming, echoing vaulted
chambers: among which the eye wanders again, and again, and again,
as every palace is succeeded by another--the terrace gardens
between house and house, with green arches of the vine, and groves
of orange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty,
thirty, forty feet above the street--the painted halls, mouldering,
and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining
out in beautiful colours and voluptuous designs, where the walls
are dry--the faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding
wreaths, and crowns, and flying upward, and downward, and standing
in niches, and here and there looking fainter and more feeble than
elsewhere, by contrast with some fresh little Cupids, who on a more
recently decorated portion of the front, are stretching out what
seems to be the semblance of a blanket, but is, indeed, a sun-dial-
-the steep, steep, up-hill streets of small palaces (but very large
palaces for all that), with marble terraces looking down into close
by-ways--the magnificent and innumerable Churches; and the rapid
passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the
vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming
with half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people--make up,
altogether, such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead:
so noisy, and yet so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and
lowering: so wide awake, and yet so fast asleep: that it is a
sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and
look about him. A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the
inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the pleasure of