f pictures by earth's proudest painters,
cased in gold on walls of council chambers where Venice sat enthroned a
queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian brocade. These
reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of loneliness
and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless horizon, the
solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and greyness of
evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city crumbling to its
grave in mud and brine.

These first impressions of Venice are true. Indeed they are inevitable.
They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures,
toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the
brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this
primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of
melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the
richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first
experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element of
unrest and unreality which vanishes upon familiarity. From the blare of
that triumphal bourdon of brass instruments emerge the delicate voices
of violin and clarinette. To the contrasted passions of our earliest
love succeed a multitude of sweet and fanciful emotions. It is my
present purpose to recapture some of the impressions made by Venice in
more tranquil moods. Memory might be compared to a kaleidoscope. Far
away from Venice I raise the wonder-working tube, allow the glittering
fragments to settle as they please, and with words attempt to render
something of the patterns I behold.

II.--A LODGING IN SAN VIO.

I have escaped from the hotels with their bustle of tourists and crowded
tables-d'hote. My garden stretches down to the Grand Canal, closed at
the end with a pavilion, where I lounge and smoke and watch the cornice
of the Prefettura fretted with gold in sunset light. My sitting-room and
bed-room face the southern sun. There is a canal below, crowded with
gondolas, and across its bridge the good folk of San Vio come and go the
whole day long--men in blue shirts with enormous hats, and jackets slung
on their left shoulder; women in kerchiefs of orange and crimson.
Bare-legged boys sit upon the parapet, dangling their feet above the
rising tide. A hawker passes, balancing a basket full of live and
crawling crabs. Barges filled with Brenta water or Mirano wine take up
their station at t