reen with moss, the terraces defaced or broken;
the palace itself partly coated with marble, is left in other places
rough with cementless and jagged brick, its iron balconies bent and
rusted, its pavements overgrown with grass. The more energetic the
effort has been to recover from this state, and to shake off all
appearance of poverty, the more assuredly the curse seems to fasten on
the scene, and the unslaked mortar, and unfinished wall, and ghastly
desolation of incompleteness entangled in decay, strike a deeper
despondency into the beholder.

Sec. 13. The feeling would be also more easily accounted for if it appeared
consistent in its regardlessness of beauty,--if what was _done_ were
altogether as inefficient as what was deserted. But the balcony, though
rusty and broken, is delicate in design, and supported on a nobly carved
slab of marble; the window, though a mere black rent in ragged plaster,
is encircled by a garland of vine and fronted by a thicket of the sharp
leaves and aurora-colored flowers of the oleander; the courtyard,
overgrown by mournful grass, is terminated by a bright fresco of
gardens and fountains; the corpse, borne with the bare face to heaven,
is strewn with flowers; beauty is continually mingled with the shadow of
death.

Sec. 14. So also is a kind of merriment,--not true cheerfulness, neither
careless nor idle jesting, but a determined effort at gaiety, a resolute
laughter, mixed with much satire, grossness, and practical buffoonery,
and, it always seemed to me, void of all comfort or hope,--with this
eminent character in it also, that it is capable of touching with its
bitterness even the most fearful subjects, so that as the love of beauty
retains its tenderness in the presence of death, this love of jest also
retains its boldness, and the skeleton becomes one of the standard
masques of the Italian comedy. When I was in Venice, in 1850, the most
popular piece of the _comic_ opera was "Death and the Cobbler," in which
the point of the plot was the success of a village cobbler as a
physician, in consequence of the appearance of Death to him beside the
bed of every patient who was not to recover; and the most applauded
scene in it was one in which the physician, insolent in success, and
swollen with luxury, was himself taken down into the abode of Death, and
thrown into an agony of terror by being shown lives of men, under the
form of wasting lamps, and his own ready to expire.

Sec. 15.