[Footnote 59:  Prominent among the more recent American writers; a native of New York, but long resident in California; noted for his vivid portraiture of the early life, and remarkable scenery of that State, in a style uncommonly suggestive.]

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=_William Dean Howells, 1837-._= (Manual, p. 531.)

From “Venetian Life.”

=_247._= SNOW IN VENICE.

...  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 snow-fall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around a 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 hands of the builder—­or, better said, just from the brain of the architect.  There was marvellous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade; and all that glorious harmony into which the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherialized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes.  The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble like peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work as if exulting in its beauty....

Through the wavering snow-fall, 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 mild and gentle 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.

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=_Mary Abigail Dodge,[60] 1838-._=

From “Wool Gathering.”

=_248._= SCENERY OF THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI.

Up the broad, cold, steel-blue river we wind steadily to its Northern home.  No flutter of its orange groves, no fragrance of its Southern roses, no echo of its summer lands, can penetrate these distances.  Only prophecies of the sturdy North are here,—­the glitter of the Polar sea, the majesty of Arctic solitudes.  The imagination is touched.  The eye looks out upon a hemisphere.  Vast spaces, lost ages, the unsealed mysteries of cold and darkness and eternal silence, sweep around the central thought, and people