Following this passionate pilgrimage with its glimpses of the New England Brahmins, came the transfer of the young Westerner to Venice, "the Chief City," as he somewhere has termed it, "of sentiment and fantasy." It was like stepping from the garish light of to-day into the pages of an old romance. The duties of his office were light, the salary was fifteen hundred dollars a year, and he was enabled to give, to use his own words, "nearly four years of nearly uninterrupted leisure" to a study of Italian literature and to poetic composition. We may catch glimpses of what the four years meant to the eager young Westerner in _A Foregone Conclusion_ and _A Fearful Responsibility_, stories that center about an American consul at Venice. The poetic quality of the period was heightened in the second year of his official life by his marriage--spring and Venice and a bride with whom to share them--no wonder that he completed a long poem in _terza rima_, "dealing," as he has expressed it, "with a story of our Civil War in a fashion so remote that no editor would print it," and that he deluged the magazines of two continents with poems and poetic sketches. For the earlier Howells was a poet--until one realizes it one fails completely to understand him. He turned from poetry reluctantly, compelled by the logic of his time and by the fact that he had no compelling message for his age. He was of the contemplative, classical school, more at home in the eighteenth century than in the stormy nineteenth. He published in 1867 _No Love Lost, A Romance of Travel_, in unrimed pentameters, a refined, leisurely poem classical in form and spirit. He issued editions of his poems in 1873 and 1886, and again as late as 1895, but the age refused to regard him as a poet and he was forced into other fields. "My literary life," he observes almost sadly as he reviews his Venetian period, "almost without my willing it, had taken the course of critical observance of books and men in their actuality."[102] From poetry Howells turned to sketches, a variety of composition which he had cultivated since his boyhood. Irving had been one of his earliest passions, and following Irving had come Ik Marvel and Hawthorne and Curtis--gentle, contemplative writers with the light of poetry upon their work. Even like Irving and Longfellow and Taylor, he would record the strange new world in which he found himself. "I was bursting with the most romantic expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as material that might be turned into literature." He lived note-book in hand. Everything was new and entrancing, even the talk of servants on the street or the babble of children at their play. It was all so new, so romantic, so removed from the world that he always had known. He would reproduce it in its naked truth for his countrymen; he would turn it all into literature for the magazines of America, and he would republish it at length as a new _Sketch Book_.