seemed to borrow the lightness and airiness of the Gothic. As you look at the numerous windows and the multitude of columns which give a striated appearance to the fronts of the palaces, you think of stalactites and icicles, such as you might imagine to ornament the abodes of the water-gods and sea-nymphs. The only thing needed to complete the poetic illusion is transparency or brilliancy of color, and this is wholly wanting; for at Venice the whitest marble is soon clouded and blackened by the corrosion of the sea-air. It is not my intention, however, to do so hackneyed a thing as to give a description of Venice. One thing, I must confess, seemed to me extraordinary: how this city, deprived as it is of the commerce which built it up from the shallows of the Adriatic, and upheld it so long and so proudly, should not have decayed even more rapidly than it has done. Trieste has drawn from it almost all its trade, and flourishes by its decline. I walked through the arsenal of Venice, which comprehends the Navy Yard, an enormous structure, with ranges of broad lofty roofs supported by massive portions of wall, and spacious dock-yards; the whole large enough to build and fit out a navy for the British empire. The pleasure-boats of Napoleon and his empress, and that of the present Viceroy, are there: but the ships of war belonging to the republic have mouldered away with the Bucentaur. I saw, however, two Austrian vessels, the same which had conveyed the Polish exiles to New York, lying under shelter in the docks, as if placed there to show who were the present masters of the place. It was melancholy to wander through the vast unoccupied spaces of this noble edifice, and to think what must have been the riches, the power, the prosperity, and the hopes of Venice at the time it was built, and what they are at the present moment. It seems almost impossible that any thing should take place to arrest the ruin which is gradually consuming this renowned city. Some writers have asserted that the lagoons around it are annually growing shallower by the depositions of earth brought down by streams from the land, that they must finally become marshes, and that their consequent insalubrity will drive the inhabitants from Venice. I do not know how this may be; but the other causes I have mentioned seem likely to produce nearly the same effect. I remembered, as these ideas passed through my mind, a passage in which one of the sacred poets foretells the desertion and desolation of Tyre, "the city that made itself glorious in the midst of the seas," "Thy riches and thy fairs, thy merchandise, thy mariners and thy pilots, thy calkers and the occupiers of thy merchandise, and all thy men of war that are in thee, shall fall into the midst of the seas in the day of thy ruin."