The Lido, of course, is here referred to. Later, in the same poem, he says:
“Servants announced the gondola, and we Through the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea Sailed to the island where the mad-house stands.”
Elsewhere he speaks of “ocean’s nurseling, Venice”; but he never states where he lodged in Venice during any of his brief visits here.
Scott arrived in Venice on the 19th of May, 1832, and he remained here until the 23d. His biographer says that he showed no curiosity about anything but the Bridge of Sighs and the adjoining dungeons, down into which latter he would scramble, though the exertion was exceedingly painful to him. It is not recorded where he lodged here, and he went slowly and sadly home to die.
George Sand and Alfred de Musset spent a number of months, in 1833-34, at the Hotel Danieli, and there De Musset was very ill of a brain-fever, caused, according to the story of old residents, by Mme. Dudevant’s desertion of him, although other, and perhaps better, authorities declare that she never left his bedside until he was pronounced out of danger. All statements agree, however, that she was not with him when his brother came for him, in the spring of 1834, and carried him back to Paris.
James Fenimore Cooper, on his arrival here in 1838, “spent a day or two at the Hotel Leone Bianco, on the northwest side of the Square”; but later he “took apartments near the Palazzo, where he set up his own gondola.” He did what we all do on our first visit to Venice; but his conclusions are so unlike those of most of us that they are worth recording. “Although Venice was attractive at first,” he says, “in the absence of acquaintances it became monotonous and wearying. A town in which the sound of wheels and hoofs is never known, in which the stillness of the narrow, ravine-like canals is seldom broken, unless by the fall of an oar or the cry of a gondolier, fatigues one by its unceasing calm. I do not remember to have been so much struck with any place on entering it. I do not recollect ever to have been so soon tired of a residence in a capital.”
The very absence of the noise of hoof and wheel, the very silence of which he complains, are, to most tired-minded travellers, the greatest of the charms of the capital city of Venice. But happily we each have our own points of view.