fantasies of rich tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier’s cry, ’Ah!  Stali!” struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat’s side; and when at last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being, “Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in Nature was wild or merciless—­Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests—­had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea.”

It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the sea on a September morning as I sailed towards it across the Adriatic from Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its loveliness was slowly and exquisitely unveiled under the slanting beams of the early sun.

In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision so enchanting and unsurpassable!  May you live to see it, Antony, before the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its beauty.

Your loving old
G.P.

29

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Born in Devon at the same time—­within a year—­as Ruskin, James Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same sanguine and poetical characteristics.  His historical writings have, I believe, been somewhat discredited of late years owing to the permission he is alleged to have given himself to warp his account of events in order to buttress some prejudice or contention of his own.

But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once restore him to our regard as a lord of visionary language:—­