Then Canova was done, and Possagno was finished; and we resumed our way to Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a memory and hardly any other consciousness.  The Duomo, which is perhaps the ugliest duomo in the world, contains an “Annunciation,” by Titian, one of his best paintings; and in the Monte di Pieta is the grand and beautiful “Entombment,” by which Giorgione is perhaps most worthily remembered.  The church of San Nicolo is interesting from its quaint and pleasing frescos by the school of Giotto.  At the railway station an admirable old man sells the most delicious white and purple grapes.

VI.

COMO.

My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer,—­a vision that remains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of July bring out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted.  Then I behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and fervors and bustle that seem intolerable after my first six months in tranquil, cool, mute Venice.  Looking at the great white Cathedral, with its infinite pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering the fierce sun upon it, I half expect to see the whole mass calcined by the heat, and crumbling, statue by statue, finial by finial, arch by arch, into a vast heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred English tourists blackening here and there upon the ruin, and contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to the horror of the scene.  All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and to the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing snows as with a peasant’s white linen kerchief.  And I am walking out upon that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which the bronze horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the city’s noonday streets, in search of Sant’ Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, or what know I?  Coming back to our hotel, “Alla Bella Venezia,” and greeted on entering by the immense fresco which covers one whole side of the court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the prow of a gondola toward the airy towers and balloon-like domes that swim above the unattainable lagoons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it in coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy was shut out upon the dusty plains and stony hills.  Our desire for water became insufferable; we paid our modest bills, and at six o’clock we took the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when Don Abbondio, walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in his hand, gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo.  I counsel the reader to turn to I Promessi Sposi, if he would know how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour.  For me, the ride through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pensiveness provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land, have given me an appetite, and I am to dine before wooing the descriptive Muse.