of the friendly town;
These are the hills that his keen eye roved,
The green like a cataract leaping down
To the plain that his pen gave new renown.

"There to the West what a range of blue!--
The very background Titian drew
To his peerless Loves. O tranquil scene!
Who than thy poet fondlier knew
The peaks and the shore and the lore between?

"See! yonder's his Venice--the valiant Spire,
Highest one of the perfect three,
Guarding the others: the Palace choir,
The Temple flashing with opal fire--
Bubble and foam of the sunlit sea."

Edgar Fawcett, always enchanted with his Venetian days, pictures the
northern lagoon, some six miles from Venice, as "a revel of pastoral
greenness, with briery hedges, numberless wild flowers and the most
captivating of sinuous creeks, overarched by an occasional bridge, so
old that you greet with respect every moss-grown inch of its drowsy and
sagging brickwork. The cathedral, the ineludible cathedral of all
Italian settlements, is reached after a short ramble, and you enter it
with mingled awe and amusement," he continues. "Some of its mosaics,
representing martyrs being devoured by flames and evidently enjoying
themselves a great deal during this mortuary process, challenge the
disrespectful smile. But others are vested with a rude yet sacred
poetry, and certain semi-Oriental marble sculptures, adjacent to the
altar, would make an infidel feel like crossing himself for the crime of
having yielded to a humorous twinge. This duomo dates far back beyond
the Middle Ages, and so does the small Church of Santa Fosca, only a
step away. What renders Torcello so individual among all the islands and
islets of the lagoon, I should say, is her continual contrast between
the ever-recurrent idyllicism of open meadows or wilding clusters of
simple rustic thickets, and the enormous antiquity of these two hoary
ecclesiastic fanes. History is in the air, and you feel that the very
daisies you crush underfoot, the very copses from which you pluck a
scented spray, have their delicate rustic ancestries, dating back to
Attila, who is said once to have brought his destructive presence where
now such sweet solemnity of desertion and quietude unmolestedly rules."

History and legend and art and romance meet and mingle to create that
indefinable sorcery of Venice. It is like nothing on earth except a
poet's dream, and his poetic dream is of th