That is from without:  within she becomes too sensuous and civic in her splendor to let me think much of souls.  “Rest and be indolent” is the motto for the life she teaches.  The architecture is the song of the lotos-eater built into stone—­were I in a more florid mood I would have said “swan-song,” for the whole stands finished with nothing more to be added:  it has sung itself out:  and if there is a moral to it all, no doubt it is in Ruskin, and I don’t wont to read it just now.

What I want is you close at hand looking up at all this beauty, and smiling when I smile, which is your way, as if you had no opinions of your own about anything in which you are not a professor.  So you will write and agree that I am to have the pleasure of this return to look forward to?  If I know that, I shall be so much more reconciled to all the joy of the things I am seeing now for the first time:  and shall see so much better the second, Beloved, when your eyes are here helping me.

Here is love, dearest! help yourself to just as much as you wish for; though all that I send is good for you!  No letter from you since Florence, but I am neither sad nor anxious:  only all the more your loving.

LETTER XXXVII.

Beloved:  The weather is as gray as England to-day, and much rainier.  To feel it on my cheeks and be back north with that and warmer things, I would go out in it in the face of protests, and had to go alone—­not Arthur even being in the mood just then for a patriotic quest of the uncomfortable.  I had myself oared into the lagoons across a racing current and a driving head-wind which made my gondolier bend like a distressed poplar over his oar; patience on a monument smiling at backsheesh—­“all comes to him who knows.”

Of course, for comfort and pleasure, and everything but economy, we have picked up a gondolier to pet:  we making much of him, and he much out of us.  He takes Arthur to a place where he can bathe—­to use his own expression—­“cleanly,” that is to say, unconventionally; and this appropriately enough is on the borders of a land called “the Garden of Eden” (being named so after its owners).  He—­“Charon,” I call him—­is large and of ruddy countenance, and talks English in blinkers—­that is to say, gondola English—­out of which he could not find words to summon me a cab even if it were not opposed to his interests.  Still there are no cabs to be called in Venice, and he is teaching us that the shortest way is always by water.  If Arthur is not punctually in his gondola by 7 A.M., I hear a call for the “Signore Inglese” go up to his window; and it is hungry Charon waiting to ferry him.

Yesterday your friend Mr. C——­ called and took me over to Murano in a beautiful pair-oared boat that simply flew.  There I saw a wonderful apse filled with mosaic of dull gold, wherein is set a blue-black figure of the Madonna, ten heads high and ten centuries old, which almost made me become a Mariolatrist on the spot.  She stands leaning up the bend with two pale hands lifted in ghostly blessing.  Underfoot the floor is all mosaic, mountainous with age and earthquakes; the architecture classic in the grip of Byzantine Christianity, which is like the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters, or Ezekiel prophesying to the dry bones.