The plains eastward of Verona on the right were amazingly rich, and the uplands and heights on the left were crowned with fine castles and beautiful little temples. Yet the beauty and richness of the region could not soothe Dante for his lost Florence. For here was his "Patmos," if we may venture on imagery borrowed from the history of a greater seer; and here the visions of the Purgatorio had passed before his eye. After a few hours' riding, the fine hills of the Tyrolese Alps came quite up to us, disclosing, as they filed past, a continuous succession of charming views. When the twilight began to gather, and they stood in their rich drapery of purple shadows, their beauty became a thing indescribable. We saw Vicenza, where, of all the spots in Italy, the Reformation found the largest number of adherents, and where Palladio arose in the sixteenth century, to arrest for a while, by his genius, the decay of the architectural arts in Italy. We saw, too, the gray Padua looking at us through the sombre shadows of its own and the day's decline. We continued our course over the flat but rich country beyond; and as night fell we reached the edge of the Lagunes.
I looked out into the watery waste with the aid of the faint light, but I could see no city, and nothing whereon a city could stand. All was sea; and it seemed idle to seek a city, or any habitation of man, in the midst of these waters. But the engine with its great red eye could see farther into the dark; and it dashed fearlessly forward, and entered on the long bridge which I saw stretching on and away over the flood, till its farther end, like that of the bridge which Mirza saw in vision, was lost in a cloud. I could see, as we rode on, on the bosom of the flood beneath us, twinkling lights, which were probably lighthouses, and black dots, which we took for boats. After a five miles' run through scenery of this novel character, the train stopped, and we found that we had arrived, not in a cloud or in a quicksand, as there seemed some reason to fear, but in a spacious and elegant station, brilliantly lighted with gas, and reminding one, from its sudden apparition and its strange site, of the fabled palace of the Sicilian Fairy Queen, only not built, like hers, of sunshine and sea-mist. We were marched in file past, first the tribunal of the searchers, and next the tribunal of the passport officials; and then an Austrian gendarme opening to each, as he passed this ordeal, the door of the station-house, I stepped out, to have my first sight, as I hoped, of the Queen of the Adriatic.