flowing
Several inches or more.

--Ah! let me not wrong thee, O Venice!
Fairest, forlornest, and saddest of all the cities, and dearest!
Dear, for my heart has won here deep peace from cruel confusion;
And in this lucent air, whose night is but tenderer noon-day,
Fear is forever dead, and hope has put on the immortal!
--There! and you need not laugh. I'm coming to something directly.
One thing: I've bought you a chain of the famous fabric of Venice--
Something peculiar and quaint, and of such a delicate texture
That you must wear it embroidered upon a riband of velvet,
If you would have the effect of its exquisite fineness and beauty.
"Isn't it very frail?" I asked of the workman who made it.
"Strong enough, if you will, to bind a lover, signora,"--
With an expensive smile. 'Twas bought near the Bridge of Rialto.
(Shylock, you know.) In our shopping, Aunt May and Fred do the
talking:
Fred begins always in French, with the most delicious effront'ry,
Only to end in profoundest humiliation and English.
Aunt, however, scorns to speak any tongue but Italian:
"Quanto per these ones here?" and "What did you say was the
prezzo?"
"Ah! troppo caro! _Too much!_ No, no! Don't I _tell_ you it's
troppo?"
All the while insists that the gondolieri shall show us
What she calls Titian's palazzo, and pines for the house of
Othello.
Annie, the dear little goose, believes in Fred and her mother
With an enchanting abandon. She doesn't at all understand them,
But she has some twilight views of their cleverness. Father is
quiet,
Now and then ventures some French when he fancies that nobody hears
him,
In an aside to the valet-de-place--I never detect him--
Buys things for mother and me with a quite supernatural sweetness,
Tolerates all Fred's airs, and is indispensably pleasant.

II.

Prattling on of these things, which I think cannot interest
deeply,
So I hold back in my heart its dear and wonderful secret
(Which I must tell you at last, however I falter to tell you),
Fain to keep it all my own for a little while longer,--
Doubting but it shall lose some part of its strangeness and
sweetness,
Shared with another, and fearful that even _you_ may not find it
Just the marvel that I do--and thus turn our friendship to hatred.

Sometimes it seems to me that this love, which I feel is eternal