sculpture or architecture, at least interesting squalor and picturesque
wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight in proper Objects of
Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that reeked with unwholesome
winter damps below, and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and
beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered casements above. Every court
had its carven well to show me, in the noisy keeping of the water-carriers
and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of the place. The remote and
noisome canals were pathetic with empty old palaces peopled by herds of
poor, that decorated the sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene
linen, and patched the lofty windows with obsolete hats.

I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from
the brilliancy of St. Mark's and the glittering streets of shops that
branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the
courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little oil-
lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines of the
Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole means of
street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and deepening
the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches. I remember
distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft night of late
winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from the Public
Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli Schiavoni.
Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I turned from the
dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a solitary gondola
gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its moonlight silver
into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the vague shipping in the
basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the Piazzetta to the
Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and casting deep into the
water under them a crimson glory that sank also down and down in my own
heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty and delight. Behind these