67

THE RIALTO.

There is a glorious city in the sea;
The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,
Ebbing and flowing; and the salt sea weed
Clings to the marble of her palaces.

ROGERS.

A THOUSAND grand remembrances and splendid visions of the past await us on the old Rialto. It was from the island of the Rialto that queenly Venice first raised her yet undiademed head; and it is on the bridge of the Rialto that she seems to have laid aside her glory, and sits deserted amid her palaces. Like the daughter of Zidon in ancient days, the harvest of the river was her revenue. She was the "crowning city," and her traffickers were the honourable of the earth. Like her, too, she has lost the girdle of her strength, and become forgotten among the nations of which she was the heart and the treasury.

There is no spot, on which the European traveller can rest his foot, more fruitful in the most interesting of historical associations than the noble bridge we are contemplating; and both the simple beauty of its broad span, the magnificent line of marble palaces which adorn the canal over which it is thrown, and its antiquity, render it in picturesque effect, and moral and romantic interest, one of the grandest monuments of past ages.

The oldest chronicles of the country ascribe the origin

of the Venetian states to the exiled inhabitants of the neighbouring lands, whom the ravages of the Gothic barbarians drove in terror from their homes. In those days of darkness and lawless violence, the rocky fastness, the marshy plain, or the low uncultivated island, was the only safe retreat of the few and the weak; and the small spots of land, which were seen just rising above the salt lagunes of the Adriatic coast, offered, in the third and fourth centuries, the securest asylum that could be found in Italy. In one of the green and oozy islands, therefore, of that little nest of cyclades, a few exiles from the Roman states raised some rude cabins, and supported themselves by fishing and by occasional barter with the neighbouring people. By degrees, the other islands became covered with huts, and the little community enjoyed a considerable degree of comfort and tranquillity. But the inhabitants were as yet unprovided with any place for religious worship; and it seemed as if they had almost forgotten the faith of their fathers, and the holy rites they had practised in the land whence they had fled. Year after year passed away in this manner, when they were suddenly roused from their indifference by an awful calamity. "By the will of God," says an old chronicler, “a fire broke out in the Rialto," or the Rivoalto, as it was then called. It began in the house of a master of a ship, and having speedily reduced this building to ashes, it seized on the adjacent ones, when the wind rushing from every quarter with great violence, the whole cluster of islands was covered with a dense mass of fiery vapour. In vain did the terrified Venetians exert their strength against the fury of the storm and

the flames. The fire rose triumphantly above the ruins of their houses, and seemed to take the form of a destroying angel, riding in scornful magnificence over the waste. It was then that, as if by sudden inspiration, one of the multitude who stood trembling at the spectacle raised his hands to heaven, and exclaimed, with a loud voice, "Father of heaven and of the revolving stars! thou great Creator, to whose empire all things are subject! restrain the madness of this fire; command these flames that they may no longer rage! We have sinned in not having had respect to thy holy church: pardon thy humble suppliants !-Neither water nor the strength of man any longer avails us, for the wind and the fire still increase, conspiring to our destruction. Save us, then, ere we be driven wanderers again from the place of our refuge !-Deliver us, and we swear to build a temple for thy holy worship!"

This prayer and vow were repeated by the rest of the assembly;-sobs and expressions of wild despair accompanying their words. But scarcely had devotion thus revisited the hearts of the Venetians, when the wind all at once ceased, the flames rose with less fierceness, the gloomy volumes of smoke, which seemed twisted like monstrous fetters about the clouds, dispersed, and the thick, sulphury air melted into copious showers of rain. The conflagration was thus subdued, and the grateful people fulfilled their vow by building the church of St. James, the first religious structure of which Venice could boast.

After this event, the Rialto and the other islands rapidly increased in populousness, and the inhabitants