Venice: An Early Impression

There would be much to say about that golden chain of historic
cities which stretches from Milan to Venice, in which the very
names--Brescia, Verona, Mantua, Padua--are an ornament to one's
phrase; but I should have to draw upon recollections now three
years old and to make my short story a long one. Of Verona and
Venice only have I recent impressions, and even to these must I
do hasty justice. I came into Venice, just as I had done before,
toward the end of a summer's day, when the shadows begin to
lengthen and the light to glow, and found that the attendant
sensations bore repetition remarkably well. There was the same
last intolerable delay at Mestre, just before your first glimpse
of the lagoon confirms the already distinct sea-smell which has
added speed to the precursive flight of your imagination; then
the liquid level, edged afar off by its band of undiscriminated
domes and spires, soon distinguished and proclaimed, however, as
excited and contentious heads multiply at the windows of the
train; then your long rumble on the immense white railway-bridge,
which, in spite of the invidious contrast drawn, and very
properly, by Mr. Ruskin between the old and the new approach,
does truly, in a manner, shine across the green lap of the lagoon
like a mighty causeway of marble; then the plunge into the
station, which would be exactly similar to every other plunge
save for one little fact--that the keynote of the great medley of
voices borne back from the exit is not "Cab, sir!" but "Barca,
signore!"

I do not mean, however, to follow the traveller through every
phase of his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice
beyond repair as the supreme bugbear of literature; though for
my own part I hold that to a fine healthy romantic appetite the
subject can't be too diffusely treated. Meeting in the Piazza on
the evening of my arrival a young American painter who told me
that he had been spending the summer just where I found him, I
could have assaulted him for very envy. He was painting forsooth
the interior of St. Mark's. To be a young American painter
unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied
with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye;
fond of colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance
between them; of old lace and old brocade and old furniture (even
when made to order); of time-mellowed harmonies on nameless
canvases and happy contours in cheap old engravings; to spend
one's mornings in still, productive analysis of the clustered
shadows of the Basilica, one's afternoons anywhere, in church or
campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's evenings in star-light
gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly