Goethe'S epigram neatly encapsulates the Romantic fascination with a city whose beauty and mystery was surely due in large measure to that curious artificial watercourse known as the canal. Chapters 2 and 3 explored some of the ways in which water, in either its static or flowing state, served as a metaphor for the absence or motion of time – not only for Goethe, but for Schubert and many others of their era. The canal, however, resists such binary categorization, containing properties of both river and sea. As an essentially one-dimensional line rather than a limitless expanse, it shares a fundamental similarity to the former, yet its lack of directional flow allies it to the latter. As such, it must have been a particularly compelling and provocative symbol of the eternal conundrums of human existence, and Goethe's evocation of the gondola as both cradle and coffin is symptomatic of this paradox.