size. We do not notice it at first. We get the effect, it goes
straight home to us, but we do not know why. It is when the
right words are conspicuous that they thunder:
The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!
When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him
arranging and clustering English words well, but not any better
than now. He is not more felicitous in concreting abstractions
now than he was in translating, then, the visions of the eyes of
flesh into words that reproduced their forms and colors:
In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It
is at once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked
FACCHINI; and now in St. Mark’s Place the music of innumerable
shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of
poverty as it engaged the elements in a struggle for the
possession of the Piazza. But the snow continued to fall, and
through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and
encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when
the most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The
lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling
snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit.
But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St.
Mark’s Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting
threads of the snowfall were woven into a spell of novel
enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me too
exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the
creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the
beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the
stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the
hand of the builder–or, better said, just from the brain of the
architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of the
mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious
harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy
exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a
hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the
drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden gloves that
tremble like peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed
them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it
danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty–beauty
which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such
evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole
life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless
shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.
Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one
of the granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as
his wont is, and the winged lion on the other might have been a
winged lamb, so gentle and mild he looked by the tender light of
the storm. The towers of the island churches loomed faint and
far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships
that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds;
the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance more
noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost
palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.
The spirit of Venice is there: of a city where Age and
Decay, fagged with distributing damage and repulsiveness among
the other cities of the planet in accordance with the policy and
business of their profession, come for rest and play between
seasons, and treat themselves to the luxury and relaxation of
sinking the shop and inventing and squandering charms all about,
instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their habit when
not on vacation.
In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes,
and a character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes accurate note
of pathetic effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street
of once dignified and elegant homes whose occupants have moved
away and left them a prey to neglect and gradual ruin and