"Venice pleases me as much as I expected, and I expected much. It is one of those places which I know before I see them, and has always haunted me the most after the East. I like the gloomy gaiety of their gondolas, and the silence of their canals. I do not even dislike the evident decay of the city, though I regret the singularity of its vanished costume; however, there is much left still; the Carnival, too, is coming. "St. Mark's, and indeed Venice, is most alive at night. The theatres are not open till _nine_, and the society is proportionably late. All this is to my taste, but most of your countrymen miss and regret the rattle of hackney coaches, without which they can't sleep. "I have got remarkably good apartments in a private house; I see something of the inhabitants (having had a good many letters to some of them); I have got my gondola; I read a little, and luckily could speak Italian (more fluently than correctly) long ago, I am studying, out of curiosity, the _Venetian_ dialect, which is very naive, and soft, and peculiar, though not at all classical; I go out frequently, and am in very good contentment. "The Helen of Canova (a bust which is in the house of Madame the Countess d'Albrizzi, whom I know) is, without exception, to my mind, the most perfectly beautiful of human conceptions, and far beyond my ideas of human execution. "In this beloved marble view, Above the works and thoughts of man, What Nature _could_, but _would not_, do, And Beauty and Canova _can_! Beyond imagination's power, Beyond the bard's defeated art, With immortality her dower, Behold the _Helen_ of the _heart_! "Talking of the 'heart' reminds me that I have fallen in love--fathomless love; but lest you should make some splendid mistake, and envy me the possession of some of those princesses or countesses with whose affections your English voyagers are apt to invest themselves, I beg leave to tell you that my goddess is only the wife of a 'Merchant of Venice;' but then she is pretty as an antelope, is but two-and-twenty years old, has the large, black, oriental eyes, with the Italian countenance, and dark glossy hair, of the curl and colour of Lady J * *'s. Then she has the voice of a lute, and the song of a seraph (though not quite so sacred), besides a long postscript of graces, virtues, and accomplishments, enough to furnish out a new chapter for Solomon's Song. But her great merit is finding out mine--there is nothing so amiable as discernment.