ors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like
phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque
distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost
palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.

The spirit of Venice is there: of a city where Age and Decay, fagged
with distributing damage and repulsiveness among the other cities of the
planet in accordance with the policy and business of their profession,
come for rest and play between seasons, and treat themselves to the
luxury and relaxation of sinking the shop and inventing and squandering
charms all about, instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their
habit when not on vacation.

In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes, and a
character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes accurate note of pathetic
effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street of once dignified
and elegant homes whose occupants have moved away and left them a prey
to neglect and gradual ruin and progressive degradation; a descent
which reaches bottom at last, when the street becomes a roost for humble
professionals of the faith-cure and fortune-telling sort.

What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy street! I don't
think I was ever in a street before when quite so many professional
ladies, with English surnames, preferred Madam to Mrs. on their
door-plates. And the poor old place has such a desperately conscious
air of going to the deuce. Every house seems to wince as you go by,
and button itself up to the chin for fear you should find out it had
no shirt on--so to speak. I don't know what's the reason, but these
material tokens of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman
isn't dreadfuler than a haggard old house, that's once been a home, in a
street like this.

Mr. Howells's pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate photographs;
they are photographs with feeling in them, and sentiment, photographs
taken in a dream, one might say.

As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I would try,
if I had the words that might approximately reach up to its high place.
I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully
and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with,
nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing
themselves and he was not aware that they were at it. For they are
unobtrusive, and quiet