them
by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the 'Worship of the Golden
Calf' and in the 'Destruction of the World by Water.' It is for them
to ponder well the flying archangel with the scales of judgment in his
hand, and the seraph-charioted Jehovah enveloping Moses upon Sinai in
lightnings.

The gondola has had a long rest. Were Francesco but a little more
impatient, he might be wondering what had become of the padrone. I bid
him turn, and we are soon gliding into the Sacca della Misericordia.
This is a protected float, where the wood which comes from Cadore
and the hills of the Ampezzo is stored in spring. Yonder square white
house, standing out to sea, fronting Murano and the Alps, they call
the Oasa degli Spiriti. No one cares to inhabit it; for here, in old
days, it was the wont of the Venetians to lay their dead for a night's
rest before their final journey to the graveyard of S. Michele. So
many generations of dead folk had made that house their inn, that it
is now no fitting home for living men. San Michele is the island close
before Murano, where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically
graceful churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has
for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at
present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment
to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be
the custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral
pyres is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with
its ruinous walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses
festering in slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the
mephitic wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror
of disgust.

The morning has not lost its freshness. Antelao and Tofana, guarding
the vale above Cortina, show faint streaks of snow upon their
amethyst. Little clouds hang in the still autumn sky. There are men
dredging for shrimps and crabs through shoals uncovered by the ebb.
Nothing can be lovelier, more resting to eyes tired with pictures than
this tranquil, sunny expanse of the lagoon. As we round the point of
the Bersaglio, new landscapes of island and Alp and low-lying mainland
move into sight at every slow stroke of the oar. A luggage-train
comes lumbering along the railway bridge, puffing white smoke into
the placid blue. Then we strike down Cannaregio, and I muse upon
processions of kings and