Venice inspires at first an almost Corybantic rapture.  From our earliest visits, if these have been measured by days rather than weeks, we carry away with us the memory of sunsets emblazoned in gold and crimson upon cloud and water; of violet domes and bell-towers etched against the orange of a western sky; of moonlight silvering breeze-rippled breadths of liquid blue; of distant islands shimmering in sun-litten haze; of music and black gliding boats; of labyrinthine darkness made for mysteries of love and crime; of statue-fretted palace fronts; of brazen clangour and a moving crowd; of pictures by earth’s proudest painters, cased in gold on walls of council chambers where Venice sat enthroned a queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian brocade.  These reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of loneliness and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless horizon, the solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and greyness of evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city crumbling to its grave in mud and brine.

These first impressions of Venice are true.  Indeed they are inevitable.  They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the brain.  Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the richest in these qualities.  Yet the mood engendered by this first experience is not destined to be permanent.  It contains an element of unrest and unreality which vanishes upon familiarity.  From the blare of that triumphal bourdon of brass instruments emerge the delicate voices of violin and clarinette.  To the contrasted passions of our earliest love succeed a multitude of sweet and fanciful emotions.  It is my present purpose to recapture some of the impressions made by Venice in more tranquil moods.  Memory might be compared to a kaleidoscope.  Far away from Venice I raise the wonder-working tube, allow the glittering fragments to settle as they please, and with words attempt to render something of the patterns I behold.

II.—­A LODGING IN SAN VIO

I have escaped from the hotels with their bustle of tourists and crowded tables-d’hote.  My garden stretches down to the Grand Canal, closed at the end with a pavilion, where I lounge and smoke and watch the cornice of the Prefettura fretted with gold in sunset light.  My sitting-room and bed-room face the southern sun.  There is a canal below, crowded with gondolas, and across its bridge the good folk of San Vio come and go the whole day long—­men in blue shirts with enormous hats, and jackets slung on their left shoulder; women in kerchiefs of orange and crimson.  Barelegged boys sit upon the parapet, dangling their feet above the rising tide.  A hawker