I wonder in how many other lives I saw some such city as Venice drifting with magic eloquence upon an opal sea! Venice, like Venus, is a God and sea-born. It is passing strange, this combination of memory and allurement from which I can not get free. It is peril. It is unsealing a too deep past, and then stealing the forgotten. I even love summer in Venice. I love the hot Italian nights and the glamour, the strangely irritating scent of the green lagoons. I love the consciousness of all the glowing, unseen paintings in its closed, vast palaces, and the beauty of its people made to paint, and the giant magnolias which light dark, windless nights like mimic moons. I never before measured accurately the torture of something one can not forget. What a background was Venice for such men as Titian, Marco Polo, Aretino, and Casanova who made a profession of love and delight, not to mention all the patricians of the 16th Century whom Yriarte reproduced in words for us! Pompeo Molmenti has written gloriously of Venice; all its grandeur he has shown; its gilt, dramatic decadence. Albert Dürer was in Venice once. Think what his eyes could see there! Dürer loved the sumptuous just as Rembrandt did. Dürer was one of the first Europeans to try to learn about, then exploit, the loveliness of great Indian palaces. A soul as rich as his always spends lavishly for poorer fellow men. It maddened De Regnier just the same as it maddens me. And for quarter of a century he wrote about it. The sight of night falling upon Venice shakes me. It keeps the eloquence of dim fatality. Night should not fall there! I wish I could have seen Goldoni’s Venice! That was the rich, the marvelously expanding Eighteenth Century. Or the Byzantine Venice of the earlier Middle Age! And then there was Renaissance Venice, violent and splendid, purple and dramatic, and Roccoco Venice which Emma Ciardi has painted with languorous, emotional light, and much lavish, clown-white satin. La Rosalba painted there. Gabriel Soulages wrote this of La Rosalba: _La Rosalba disdaining for a day his paints and brushes Took up a drop of gold. One single drop of gold: With it he drew upon the flank of this great antique vase the Muses Nine._ Venice where men painted with gold and dreamed with gems. Sumptuous, dead Capital City of an Old World that now too is dying! A symbol of loveliness! When the Spanish Conquerors first caught sight of what is now Mexico City they exclaimed: _The Venice of the Aztecs!_ As soon as time began to be considered something that could be measured, controlled, then sold for counted pieces of silver, the property of man in short, the making of things fine began to come to an end. Books were rare possessions in days care-free of time, when there was but one objective, _quality_.