Just now the sun came out and I witnessed a Turner effect. First this lovely bay was suffused with a silvery-gold light--its very surface. Then the clouds in the west broke into ragged masses. The sails, the islands, the low buildings in the distance began to stand out brilliantly. Even the Campanile, San Giorgio Maggiore and the Salute took on an added glory. I was witnessing a great sky-and-water song, a poem, a picture--something to identify Venice with my life. Three ducks went by, high in the air, honking as they went. A long black flotilla of thin-prowed coal barges passed in the foreground. The engines of a passing steamer beat rhythmically and I breathed deep and joyously to think I had witnessed all. * * * * * Bells over the water, the lap of waves, the smell of seaweed. How soft and elevated and ethereal voices sound at this time. An Italian sailor, sitting on the grass looking out over it all, has his arms about his girl. * * * * * It would be easy to give an order for ten thousand lovely views of Venice, and get them. * * * * * CHAPTER XLI VENICE Aside from the cathedral of St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace and the Academy or Venetian gallery of old masters, I could find little of artistic significance in Venice--little aside from the wonderful spectacle of the city as a whole. As a spectacle, viewed across the open space of water, known as the Lagoon, the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Santa Maria della Salute with their domes and campaniles strangely transfigured by light and air, are beautiful. Close at hand, for me, they lost much romance which distance gave them, though the mere space of their interiors was impressive. The art, according to my judgment, was bad and in the main I noticed that my guide books agreed with me--spiritless religious representations which, after the Sistine Chapel in Rome and such pictures as those of Michelangelo’s “Holy Family” and Botticelli’s “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi at Florence, were without import. I preferred to speculate on the fear of the plague which had produced the Salute and the discovery of the body of St. Stephen, the martyr, which had given rise to San Giorgio, for it was interesting to think, with these facts before me, how art and spectacle in life so often take their rise from silly, almost pointless causes and a plain lie is more often the foundation of a great institution than a truth. Santa Maria didn’t save the citizens of Venice from the plague in 1630, and in 1110 the Doge Ordelafo Faliero did not bring back the true body of St. Stephen from Palestine, although he may have thought he did,--at least there are other “true bodies.” But the old, silly progress of illusion, vanity, politics and the like has produced these and other institutions throughout the world