We have called them the phantoms of the lagoons, those islands that lie like shadows among the silver waters; for it is in this likeness that they appear to us of the city--strangely mirrored, remote, a group of clustering spirits, whose common halo is the sea. They are a choir of spirits, yet each has a mute music of its own, and accosting them one by one--slowly and in the silence entering into their life--we may come to know and love the several members of this company of the blest, till our senses grow alive to their harmony as they sing together, sometimes in the clear, cold light of the spreading dawn, sometimes in the evening twilight--when peak after peak is lit with the flame of sacrifice and, in the Titanic memory of the sunset cloud, the great fire lit on earth burns up with solemn flames into the sky. All the languors, the fierce passions, of Venice, her vitality and her mysticism, are mirrored in the lagoons; there is no pulse of Venice that does not beat in them; in swift sequence, as in a lighter element, they reflect the phases of her being. And the islands of the lagoons are, as it were, the footsteps of young Venice. As she was passing into her kingdom, she set her feet here and there among the waters, and where she trod a life was born. Her roots are far back in the past, far up upon the mainland, where still remain some fragments of the giant growth, which, grafted in the lagoons, was to expand there into a new fulness of beauty and life. It is as if the genius that conceived Jesolo, Torcello, the Madonna of San Donato, had undergone a sea-change as it moved towards the Adriatic, as if some vision had passed before it and shaken it, as if the immutable had felt the first touch of mutability--had been endowed with a new sense born of the ebb and flow of ocean tides. In Malamocco she stepped too near the sea, and left behind the mystery of a city submerged; but no one can receive into his mind the peerless blue and green of the open water beyond the Lido, with the foam upon it, or the sound of its incessant sweep against the shore, without feeling that the spirit that had thus embraced the sea had received a new pulse into her being--a nerve of desire, of expansion, of motion, which her mountain infinitudes had not inspired. And with the new life came new dreams to Venice, dreams she was not slow to realise, and into them were woven materials for which we should seek in vain among the islands, except in so far as the reflex of her later activities fell also upon them. The Madonna of San Donato is the goddess of the lagoons; and if there are children of Venice who creep also for blessing and for protection to the borders of her dusky garment, they are but few. The mystic beauty of that Madonna was not the beauty that inspired Venice when she built upon the seas. The robe of her divinity was more akin to the dazzling incomparable blue of the bay that lies within the curve of the Schiavoni, as we