Contarini Fleming Author:Benjamin Disraeli Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CONTARINI FLEMING, Another sun rose upon Venice, and presented to me the city whose image I had so early acquired. In the heart of a multitude there was still... more »ness. I looked out from the balcony on the crowded quays of yesterday ; one or two idle porters were stretched in sleep on the scorching pavement, and a solitary gondola stole over the gleaming waters. This was all. It was the Villeggiatura, and the absence of the nobility from the city invested it with an aspect even more deserted than it would otherwise have possessed. I cared not for this. For me indeed, Venice, silent and desolate, owned a greater charm than it could have commanded with all its feeble imitation of the worthless bustle of a modern metropolis. 1 congratulated myself on the choice season of the year in which I had arrived at this enchanting city. I do not think that I could have endured to have been disturbed by the frivolous sights and sounds of society, before I had formed a full acquaintance with all those marvels of art that command our constant admiration, while gliding about the lost capital of the doges, and before I had yielded a free flow to those feelings of poetic melancholy which swell up in the soul as we contemplate this memorable theatre of human action, wherein have been performed so many of man's most famous and most graceful deeds. If I were to assign the particular quality which conduces to that dreamy and voluptuous existence which men of high imagination experience in Venice, I should describe it as the feeling of abstraction, which is remarkable in that city, and peculiar to it. Venice is the only city which can yield the magical delights of solitude. All is still and silent. No rude sound disturbs your reveries ; fancy, therefore, is not put to flight. No rude sound distracts ...« less