balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief, and threw
long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that uncertain
glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so, unhaunted by
any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the forlorn beauty
of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper time to think all
the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them; but they passed
vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the sensations of
sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there, and the moral
and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty and surprise.
The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and unlooked-for events
gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and safely around sharp
corners of life. And all the while I knew that this was a progress through
narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles of palaces. But I did
not know then that this fine confusion of sense and spirit was the first
faint impression of the charm of life in Venice.

Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had
warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the
lines of balconied palaces had never ended;--here and there at their doors
larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving uncertainly about
on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the Grand Canal into one of
the smaller channels, and from comparative light into a darkness only
remotely affected by some far-streaming corner lamp. But always the
pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven with its trembling stars
above, and the dark water with its trembling stars below; but now
innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness, and ceaseless sudden turns
and windings. One could not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these
strait and solitary passages, which was part of the strange enjoyment of
the time, and which was referable to the novelty, the hush, the darkness,
and the piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers.