I had been musing long that day and earnestly upon the mystery of the lagoons, their opaline transparencies of air and water, their fretful risings and sudden subsidence into calm, the treacherousness of their shoals, the sparkle and the splendour of their sunlight.  I had asked myself how would a Greek sculptor have personified the elemental deity of these salt-water lakes, so different in quality from the AEgean or Ionian sea?  What would he find distinctive of their spirit?  The Tritons of these shallows must be of other form and lineage than the fierce-eyed youth who blows his conch upon the curled crest of a wave, crying aloud to his comrades, as he bears the nymph away to caverns where the billows plunge in tideless instability.

We had picked up shells and looked for sea-horses on the Adriatic shore.  Then we returned to give our boatmen wine beneath the vine-clad pergola.  Four other men were there, drinking, and eating from a dish of fried fish set upon the coarse white linen cloth.  Two of them soon rose and went away.  Of the two who stayed, one was a large, middle-aged man; the other was still young.  He was tall and sinewy, but slender, for these Venetians are rarely massive in their strength.  Each limb is equally developed by the exercise of rowing upright, bending all the muscles to their stroke.  Their bodies are elastically supple, with free sway from the hips and a mercurial poise upon the ankle.  Stefano showed these qualities almost in exaggeration.  The type in him was refined to its artistic perfection.  Moreover, he was rarely in repose, but moved with a singular brusque grace.  A black broad-brimmed hat was thrown back upon his matted zazzera of dark hair tipped with dusky brown.  This shock of hair, cut in flakes, and falling wilfully, reminded me of the lagoon grass when it darkens in autumn upon uncovered shoals, and sunset gilds its sombre edges.  Fiery grey eyes beneath it gazed intensely, with compulsive effluence of electricity.  It was the wild glance of a Triton.  Short blonde moustache, dazzling teeth, skin bronzed, but showing white and healthful through open front and sleeves of lilac shirt.  The dashing sparkle of this animate splendour, who looked to me as though the sea-waves and the sun had made him in some hour of secret and unquiet rapture, was somehow emphasised by a curious dint dividing his square chin—­a cleft that harmonised with smile on lip and steady flame in eyes.  I hardly know what effect it would have upon a reader to compare eyes to opals.  Yet Stefano’s eyes, as they met mine, had the vitreous intensity of opals, as though the colour of Venetian waters were vitalised in them.  This noticeable being had a rough, hoarse voice, which, to develop the parallel with a sea-god, might have screamed in storm or whispered raucous messages from crests of tossing billows.

I felt, as I looked, that here, for me at least, the mythopoem of the lagoons was humanised; the spirit of the saltwater lakes had appeared to me; the final touch of life emergent from nature had been given.  I was satisfied; for I had seen a poem.