Was not this Venice, and is not Venice forever associated with bravoes and
unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise of mine might represent fabulous
wealth to the uncultivated imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could
understand the Facts of the Situation--(as we say in the journals)? To
move on was relief; to pause was regret for past transgressions mingled
with good resolutions for the future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of
all these emotions, when, slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola
suddenly rested at the foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door.
The gondoliers rang and rang again, while their passenger

"Divided the swift mind,"

in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could
possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles and
service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest
swindling countenance of a hotel _portier_, he felt secure against
every thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and
conjecture at once faded from his thought, when the _portier_
suffered the gondoliers to make him pay a florin too much.

So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that complex
spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most alluring
glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any fragment of
her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had been
penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had been
touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its
presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.

I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my arrival