in London, suddenly for a moment out of the life of the place, not made or contrived as in Paris or Florence, but naturally, a living thing, shy and evanescent.  Here poverty and riches jostle one another side by side as they do in life, and are antagonistic and hate one another.  Yet Genoa, alone of all the cities of Italy proper is living to-day, living the life of to-day, and with all her glorious past she is as much a city of the twentieth century as of any other period of history.  For, while others have gone after dreams and attained them and passed away, she has clung to life, and the god of this world was ever hers.  She has made to herself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, and they have remained faithful to her.  Her ports grow and multiply, her trade increases, still she heaps up riches, and if she cannot tell who shall gather them, at least she is true to herself and is not dependent on the stranger or the tourist.  The artist, it is said, is something of a daughter of joy, and in thinking of Florence or Venice, which live on the pleasure of the stranger, we may find the truth of a saying so obvious.  Well, Genoa was never an artist.  She was a leader, a merchant, with fleets, with argosies, with far-flung companies of adventure.  Through her gates passed the silks and porcelains of the East, the gold of Africa, the slaves and fair women, the booty and loot of life, the trade of the world.  This is her secret.  She is living among the dead, who may or may not awaken.

If you are surprised in her streets by the greatness of old things, it is only to find yourself face to face with the new.  People, tourists do not linger in her ways—­they pass on to Pisa.  Genoa has too little to show them, and too much.  She is not a museum, she is a city, a city of life and death and the business of the world.  You will never love her as you will love Pisa or Siena or Rome or Florence, or almost any other city of Italy.  We do not love the living as we love the dead.  They press upon us and contend with us, and are beautiful and again ugly and mediocre and heroic, all between two heart beats; but the dead ask only our love.  Genoa has never asked it, and never will.  She is one of us, her future is hidden from her, and into her mystery none has dared to look.  She is like a symphony of modern music, full of immense gradual crescendos, gradual diminuendos, unknown to the old masters.  Only Rome, and that but seldom, breathes with her life.  But through the music of her life, so modern, so full of a sort of whining and despair in which no great resolution or heroic notes ever come, there winds an old-world melody, softly, softly, full of the sun, full of the sea, that is always the same, mysterious, ambiguous, full of promises, at her feet.

III