ALL SOULS’ DAY AT VENICE
They had put a bridge of boats from the northernmost quay of Venice to the cemetery island. A dense crowd, coming and going across it, black over the black anchored barges, each two with their yard of pale water between their tarred hulls. And, as we draw near, as we go beneath, the seeming silence turns into a murmur, and a rumble.
For this one day in all the year the cemetery island is bridged on to the islands of the living. This is no mere coincidence, but a real symbol.
The cloisters and the gardens are full as for a fair, crowds coming and going, buying tapers, lighting them at the glittering wax-lights before the chapel, bringing a few flowers.... Surely for these poor folk there is a reality, if only a negative one, in this suspending of the labour, cares, the empty grind of life; and their hour of watching by the dead may be, in some way deeper than words can say, an hour of communing with the eternities.
While thus the cemetery was given up to the living and to the long dead, the scarcely dead, the real dead, were arriving here and there with the real mourners. I noted a mound of fresh earth, with the ritual trowel sticking in it, a couple of surpliced and shaven Franciscans reciting the prayers to a few blear, red-eyed people (a nun among them); all these new-comers and their ministering clergy seeming a little scared by intruding their own dead man or woman into this great public feast of those who have long passed beyond. And the crowd, on its side, looked surprised at this new and definite reality of loss in the midst of its vaguer mournings; this man or woman, only just dead, carried in among those shadowy memories.
Very touching also were the little framed photographs, clean and evidently taken off some poor table or wall, and hung on the cross for the afternoon; the dead pauper having his effigy also on his grave, like the rich man among his marble, if only for those few hours.
As we got back into the gondola the crowd was streaming only one way along the black bridge; away from the cemetery, back into life.
VERNON LEE.
VENICE IN WINTER
In Venice only the melancholy drenching rain of a winter’s day brings rest to the eye, when water meets water, and sky is washed into sea and the city lies soaking and dripping between two floods. But soon the wind shifts to the north-east, out breaks the sun again, and all Venice is instantly in a glare of light and colour and startling distinctness, like the sails and rigging of a ship at sea on a clear day.
FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD.
VENICE: THE END OF WINTER
There is joy in the heart of each Venetian when the end of winter is reached at last, and once more are visible, lying like pearls on the spring-blue ocean, the islands of Murano and Malamocco. They have long been veiled from view by opal mists, sometimes but half obscured and lying like a ghostly mirage in the distance. But now they stand out like bright and beautiful cameos, glistening white on a surface of blue. Tower and wall and roof, washed clean and new by the refreshing winter mists, stand ready to receive the sunlight. For these sun-loving and warmth-loving people the year should be always summer! This first bright burst of warm sunshine has set the spirit of cheer in the heart of each gondolier as he stands by his own favourite traghetto, furbishing up his gondola and preparing for the coming glorious seasons of spring and summer in Venice! He smiles and jokes again; he shouts once more in his old way to his brother gondolier across the opposite shore—É primavera! é primavera!
ENRICO ALBINI.