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every thing was written down and nothing spoken out." They fill nearly
three hundred rooms. Among them are manuscripts from the archives of
nearly two thousand families, monasteries and convents. The secret
history of Venice for a thousand years is here--its plots, its hidden
trials, its assassinations, its commissions of hireling spies and masked
bravoes--food, ready to hand, for a world of dark and mysterious
romances.
Yes, I think we have seen all of Venice. We have seen, in these old
churches, a profusion of costly and elaborate sepulchre ornamentation
such as we never dreampt of before. We have stood in the dim religious
light of these hoary sanctuaries, in the midst of long ranks of dusty
monuments and effigies of the great dead of Venice, until we seemed
drifting back, back, back, into the solemn past, and looking upon the
scenes and mingling with the peoples of a remote antiquity. We have been
in a half-waking sort of dream all the time. I do not know how else to
describe the feeling. A part of our being has remained still in the
nineteenth century, while another part of it has seemed in some
unaccountable way walking among the phantoms of the tenth.
We have seen famous pictures until our eyes are weary with looking at
them and refuse to find interest in them any longer. And what wonder,
when there are twelve hundred pictures by Palma the Younger in Venice and
fifteen hundred by Tintoretto? And behold there are Titians and the
works of other artists in proportion. We have seen Titian's celebrated
Cain and Abel, his David and Goliah, his Abraham's Sacrifice. We have
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