ican writers; a native
of New York, but long resident in California; noted for his vivid
portraiture of the early life, and remarkable scenery of that State, in
a style uncommonly suggestive.]

* * * * *

=_William Dean Howells, 1837-._= (Manual, p. 531.)

From "Venetian Life."

=_247._= SNOW IN VENICE.

... The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling
snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But
looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's Church
was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the
snow-fall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around a
structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic
loveliness to be anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had
compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so
hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the
hands of the builder--or, better said, just from the brain of the
architect. There was marvellous freshness in the colors of the mosaics
in the great arches of the facade; and all that glorious harmony into
which the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily
supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherialized
by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly
on the golden globes that tremble like peacock-crests above the vast
domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in
ermine; and it danced over all its work as if exulting in its beauty....

Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the
granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is,
and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so mild
and gentle he looked by the tender light of the storm. The towers of the
island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the sailors 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.

* * * * *

=_Mary Abigail Dodge,[60] 1838-._=

From "Wool Gathering."

=_248._= SCENERY OF THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI.

Up the broad, cold, steel-blue river we wind steadily to its Northern
home. No flutter of its