He thought of the energy that had gone to build this wonderful city;
the deep sea-soaked wooden piles hidden beneath; the exhaustless art
treasures--churches, pictures, sculptures--no less built on obscure
human labor, though a few of the innumerable dead hands had signed
names. What measureless energy petrified in these palaces! Carpaccio's
pictures floated before him, and Tintoretto's--record of dead
generations; and then, by the link of size, those even vaster
paintings--in gouache--of Vermayen in Vienna: old land-fights with
crossbow, spear, and arquebus, old sea-fights with inter-grappling
galleys. He thought of galley-slaves chained to their oar--the sweat,
the blood that had stained history. "So I returned and considered all
the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of
such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter." And then he
thought of a modern picture with a beautiful nude female figure that
had cost the happiness of a family; the artist now dead and immortal,
the woman, once rich and fashionable, on the streets. The futility of
things--love, fame, immortality! All roads lead nowhere! What profit
shall a man have from all his labor which he hath done under the sun?

No; it was all a flux--there was nothing but flux. +Panta rhei+. The
wisest had always seen that. The cat which devoured the kid, and the
dog which bit the cat, and the staff which smote the dog, and the fire
which burnt the staff, and so on endlessly. Did not the commentators
say that that was the meaning of this very parable--the passing of the
ancient empires, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome? Commentators!
what curious people! What a making of books to which there was no end!
What a wilderness of waste logic the Jewish intellect had wandered in
for ages! The endless volumes of the Talmud and its parasites! The
countless codes, now obsolescent, over which dead eyes had grown dim!
As great a patience and industry as had gone to build Venetian art,
and with less result. The chosen people, indeed! And were they so
strong and sane? A fine thought in his brain, forsooth!

He, worn out by the great stress of the centuries, such long
in-breeding, so many ages of persecution, so many manners and
languages adopted, so many nationalities taken on! His soul must be
like a palimpsest with the record of nation on nation. It was uncanny,
this clinging to life; a race should be content to die out. And in him
it had perhaps gr