With the right companion, what talks are possible, as you glide out in the last flush of evening towards the more distant lagoons and wait for the moon to come up out of Istria across the sea! Your gondolier, silent as Charon, is behind you and you forget his existence. And all the rest is behind too, but very far behind—daily life with its horrid strident claims and calculations that won’t even leave honey-mooning couples alone! Time has ceased, and the world is standing still to let you look at life in its beauty and kiss its face in its peace. When at last you say, without turning your head, “A casa, Sandruccio,” your black swan quivers an instant from low stern to dark-arched prow, swings round in the smallest space any boat did ever turn in, and you float back to the regular rhythm of Sandruccio’s twenty-foot oar, till a necklace of light lies low on the land, and the faintest of songs—a very mist of music—is wafted over the water. “Alla Pizzetta?” inquires Sandruccio, speaking for the first time, and in a voice expressing much amused indulgence for dreaming lovers. A few minutes later he is imperiously ordering fellow-gondoliers out of his way to the steps, is holding the side of the swan the eighth of an inch off the grind of the stone, and you and your other self dance on shore to become light-hearted young people, keeping time surreptitiously to the gay waltz of the band and laughing at everything and nothing because all the festive crowd around you is doing the same thing. Witch and tyrant as she is—and perhaps for that very reason, since tyrants must know how to yield as well as how to rule—Venice will meet you in almost all your moods, and create new ones for you if you have none of your own. I used to get dazzled with all the splendour of palaces and churches; these last are so full of the glorification of great men—the monuments and ornamentation are so obtrusive that there seems scarcely any room for prayer. San Marco itself, dream of beauty as it is, inspires less devotion than many a humble country church without a single work of art to recommend it. Without the ineffable Presence in the Tabernacle I should have felt more piously disposed at the foot of the lonely shrine out in the lagoon, where the Blessed Madonna’s picture smiles down from its tall tarred post on the flowers that one or other of her children brings there every day. The water laps gently at her feet, the sky arches blue overhead, and one can dream very good and happy dreams as one gazes up at her. But in San Marco, just as in the Doges’ Palace, one is teased by two things—the necessity of thought and appreciation, and that horrid sense one has in so many places in Italy of all the prying irreverence that expert—sceptic—heretics have brought to bear on it—as if the cleverest ant that ever crawled and builded underground could measure the courses of the stars!