[10] "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori, Dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere." [11] "Nec me meminisse pigebit Elissæ." TWO VENETIAN STUDIES. I. VENICE AND ROME. It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose boatmen bandy _lazzi_ and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water, from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And yet really to understand the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was from the vast Alpine chain which hangs in the haze of midday like a long dim cloud-line to the north that the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the Roman world. Their path lay, along the coast trending round to the west, where lost among little villages that stand out white in the distant shadow lie the sites of Heraclea and Altinum. Across these grey shallows cut by the blue serpentine windings of deeper channels the Romans of the older province of Venetia on the mainland fled before Attila or Theodoric or Alboin to found the new Venetia of the lagoon. Eastward over Lido the glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of the Pirate war, that, struggle for life which shaped into their after-form the government and destinies of the infant state. Venice itself, the crown and end of struggle and of flight, lies over shining miles of water to the south. But it is here that one can best study the story of its birth; it is easier to realize those centuries of exile and buffeting for life amid the dreary flats, the solitude, the poverty of Torcello than beneath the gleaming front of the Ducal Palace or the mosaics of St. Mark.