238 ST. MARK’S REST

“Deep Stream,”¹ which sweeps round, as you see, in that sigma of canal, as the Wharfe round the shingly bank of Bolton Abbey,-a notablest Crook of Lune, this; and Castrum, here, on sands that will abide.

It is strange how seldom rivers have been named from their depth. Mostly they take at once some dear, companionable name, and become gods, or at least living creatures, to the refreshed people; if not thus Pagan-named, they are noted by their colour, or their purity,-White River, Black River, Rio Verde, Aqua Dolce, Fiume di Latte; but scarcely ever, “Deep River.”

39. And this Venetian slow-pacing water, not so much as a river, or anything like one; but a rivulet, “fiumicello,” only rising in those low mounds of volcanic hill to the west. “’Rialto,’ ’Rialtum,’ ‘Prealtum’” (another idea getting confused with the first), “dal fiumicello di egual nome che, scendendo dei colli Euganei, gettavasi nel Brenta, con esso scorrendo lungo quelle isole dette appunto Realtine.”* The serpentine depth, consistent always among consistent shallow, being here vital; and the conception of it partly mingled with that of the power of the open sea-the infinite “Altum”; sought by the sacred water, as in the dream of Æneas, “lacu fluvius se condidit alto.”² Hence the united word takes, in declining Latin, the shorter form, Rialtum,-properly, in the scholarship of the State-documents, “Rivoaltus.” So also, throughout Venice, the Latin Rivus softens into Rio; the Latin Ripa into Riva, in the time when you had the running water-not “canals,” but running brooks of sea,-“lympha fugax,”³-trembling in eddies, between, not quays, but banks of pasture land; soft “campi,” of which, in St. Margaret’s field,⁴

* Romanin [vol. i. p. 44].

¹ [For the first encampment on the island of Rialto (the deep stream), see Stones of Venice, vol. i. (Vol. IX. pp. 19, 417).]

² [Æneid, viii. 66.]

³ [Horace: Odes, ii. 3, 12 (“quid obliqua laborat lympha fugax trepidare rivo”).]

⁴ [The square is now paved all over.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]