The Sea-Charm of Venice (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Those mountains towering as from waves of flame Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. Again and again I have seen this apparent transparency of the peaks. That Shelley recorded it is one example of how closely he observed nature, and how accurately he recorded her doings. Much more might be said of the islands; but this seems enough. Each of them, right away to the Piave on one side and to Ghioggia on the other, has its history, its religion, and its ruin. Perhaps one of the greatest pleasures of the lagoon is sailing on it. A gondola is scarcely a safe boat to sail, except in a following wind. It has no keel, and it turns over easily, but with one of the great oars behind it steers steadily. Once, with two rowers, I took more than two hours to row from Venice to Torcello against the wind. I sailed back in forty minutes. The lagoon was rough with short tossing waves edged with foam, indescribably fresh and gay. The long boat, with its flat bottom, flew over the surface of four or five waves together, at a torrent speed. I never was so conscious of swiftness, and the boat itself was alive beneath, all its will in its movement, pulling and leaping like an Arab steed. This was delightful; nor is it less delightful, having made friends with the owners of one of the larger boats, to sail up and down the sea-streets of the lagoon, when the wind is fresh and the tide running fast, and the night is dark, save for glimpses of the hurrying moon. The steersman is silent, the sky is silent, the soul itself is silent. Nothing speaks but the wind in the sail and the water round the rushing prow, and these sounds deepen the silence. That which men feel who stand sentinel on the bow of a ship in the midst of...