says Childe Harold; and that, indeed, is the feeling everywhere in these romantic countries. You cannot separate them from the characters with which poetry or history once peopled them. At sunset we mounted into the tower of San Marc, to get a general view of the city. The gold-dust atmosphere, so common in Italy at this hour, was all over the broad lagunes and the far stretching city; and she lay beneath us, in the midst of a sea of light, an island far out into the ocean, crowned with towers and churches, and heaped up with all the splendors of architecture. The Friuli mountains rose in the north with the deep blue dyes of distance, breaking up the else level horizon; the shore of Italy lay like a low line-cloud in the west; the spot where the Brenta empties into the sea glowing in the blaze of the sunset. About us lay the smaller islands, the suburbs of the sea-city, and all among them, and up and down the Giudecca, and away off in the lagunes, were sprinkled the thousand gondolas, meeting and crossing in one continued and silent panorama. The Lido, with its long wall hemmed in the bay, and beyond this lay the wide Adriatic. The floor of San Marc's vast square was beneath, dotted over its many-colored marbles with promenaders, its _cafés_ swarmed by the sitters outside, and its long arcades thronged. One of my pleasantest hours in Venice was passed here. LETTER XXXIII. PALACES--PALAZZO GRIMANI--OLD STATUARY--MALE AND FEMALE CHERUBS--THE BATH OF CLEOPATRA--TITIAN'S PALACE--UNFINISHED PICTURE OF THE GREAT MASTER--HIS MAGDALEN AND BUST--HIS DAUGHTER IN THE ARMS OF A SATYR--BEAUTIFUL FEMALE HEADS--THE CHURCHES OF VENICE--BURIAL-PLACES OF THE DOGES--TOMB OF CANOVA--DEPARTURE FOR VERONA, ETC.