Greater than Torcello, and still maintaining, as near neighbour to Venice, something of its old activities, Murano lives, none the less, a phantom life. We would choose, as a fitting atmosphere for Murano, a day of delicate lights and pale, lucent water, with faint fine tints within the water and the sky: a day of the falling year, not expectant, only acceptant, pausing in the dim quiet of its decay. Even the hot sunshine, though it irradiates the features of Murano, cannot penetrate to that spent heart. The marvellous fascination of its Grand Canal, with its swift and unaccustomed current of blue waters, cannot draw us from the sadness, or disperse the spectral melancholy which invades the spirit and surrounds it as an atmosphere. The sun infects the dirty children with a desire to shine, and prompts somersaults for a soldino; but the weary women, the old, crouching men, still creep about the fondamenta impervious to his rays. Murano is not less disinherited, not less phantasmal, because the daylight comes to pierce the semblance of her life. It is strangely invasive and possessing, this sentiment of a life outlived, a body whose soul is fled. The long vine gardens that spread to the lagoon, dispossessed, but still apparently doing service and rich in vegetables and fruit, seem as if they would persuade us of their reality; but their walls are ruined, their ways are low and narrow; it was not thus they looked when Bembo and Navagero paced here in an earthly paradise, a haunt of nymphs and demigods. The living population of Murano seems to have fallen under the same spell. If we bestow on them more than a cursory glance as we pass along the fondamenta, we seem to detect in their faces an indescribable sense of weariness and sorrow and decay. There seem many old among them, and on the young toil and privation have already laid their hand. The strange habitual chant of priest and women and young girls, going up from tired nerveless throats in the twilight of San Pietro Martire, seemed a symbol of the voice of Murano, melancholy, mechanical, the phantom of a voice--an echo struck with the hand or by a breath of wind from a fallen instrument, an instrument that has lost its virtue and its ring, an instrument unstrung. We have seen Murano in festa. She can pay her tribute to free Italy. Ponte Lungo was hung with lamps, and the desolate campi had their share in the illumination. In the very piazza of San Donato a hawker was winding elastic strings of golden treacle, while women and children in gay dresses hurried to and fro. In another square, under the clock tower, a demagogue addressed the crowd excitedly: there was plentiful noise, plentiful determination to enjoy. The campanile looked down and wondered. _O Roma o morte._ Had it been Rome then and not death? Rome and freedom, freedom to destroy the historic and the old? It was a grand triumph, a triumph justly commemorated, and yet the conquerors themselves might grieve over the Italy of to-day.