oof, windows at
each end, and portieres along the walls of old blue Venetian linen: a
place in which it seems one could only live and think nobly. His face
seems to respond to its teachings. What more might not an environment
like that bring out in you? Come and let me see! I have hopes springing
as I think of things that you may be coming after all; and that that is
what lay concealed under the gayety of your last paragraph. Then I am
more blessed even than I knew. What, you are coming? So well I do love
you, my Beloved!

LETTER XLI.

Dearest: This letter will travel with me: we leave to-day. Our
movements are to be too restless and uncomfortable for the next few days
for me to have a chance of quiet seeing or quiet writing anywhere. At
Riva we shall rest, I hope.

Yesterday a storm began coming over towards evening, and I thought to
myself that if it passed in time there should be a splendid sunset of
smolder and glitter to be seen from the Campanile, and perhaps by good
chance a rainbow.

I went alone: when I got to the top the rain was pelting hard; so there
I stayed happily weather-bound for an hour looking over Venice "silvered
with slants of rain," and watching umbrellas scuttering below with toes
beneath them. The golden smolder was very slow in coming: it lay over
the mainland and came creeping along the railway track. Then came the
glitter and the sun, and I turned round and found my rainbow. But it
wasn't a bow, it was a circle: the Campanile stood up as it were a
spoke in the middle,--the lower curve of the rainbow lay on the ground
of the Piazzetta, cut off sharp by the shadow of the Campanile. It was
worth waiting an hour to see. The islands shone mellow and bright in the
clearance with the storm going off black behind them. Good-by, Venice!

* * * * *

Verona began by seeming dull to me; but it improves and unfolds beautiful
corners of itself to be looked at: only I am given so little time. The
Tombs of the Della Scalas and the Renaissance facade of the Consiglio are
what chiefly delight me. I had some quiet hours in the Museo, where I fell
in love with a little picture by an unknown painter, of Orpheus charming
the beasts in a wandering green landscape, with a dance of fauns in the
distance, and here and there Eurydice running;--and Orpheus in Hades, and
the Thracian women killing him, and a crocodile fishing out his head, and
mermaids and ducks sitting above