procession takes the width of the Grand Canal in its magnificent course,
soft crimson flushes play upon the old, weather-darkened palaces, and die
tenderly away, giving to light and then to shadow the opulent sculptures
of pillar, and arch, and spandrel, and weirdly illuminating the grim and
bearded visages of stone that peer down from doorway and window. It is a
sight more gracious and fairy than ever poet dreamed; and I feel that the
lights and the music have only got into my description by name, and that
you would not know them when you saw and heard them, from any thing I say.
In other days, people tell you, the fresco was much more impressive than
now. At intervals, rockets used to be sent up, and the Bengal lights,
burned during the progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers' spectral
shadows, giant-huge, on the palace-walls. But, for my part, I do not care
to have the fresco other than I know it: indeed, for my own selfish
pleasure, I should be sorry to have Venice in any way less fallen and
forlorn than she is.

Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever seen on the Grand Canal are
the great boats of the river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from
Chioggia, come up to the city with the swelling sea. They are built with a
pointed stern and bow rising with the sweep of a short curve from the
water high above the cabin roof, which is always covered with a straw
matting. Black is not the color of the gondolas alone, but of all boats in
Venetia; and these of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any one
of them might be sent to take King Arthur and bear him to Avilon, whither
I think most of them are bound. A path runs along either gunwale, on which
the men pace as they pole the boat up the canal,--her great sail folded
and lying with the prostrate mast upon the deck. The rudder is a
prodigious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly kind enough to wear
a red cap with a blue tassel, and to smoke. The other persons on board are
no less obliging and picturesque, from the dark-eyed young mother who sits