TOWARDS VENICE
The gates were opened and we passed into the sea. There was a ‘breath of Venice in the breeze;’ the odour of the lagoons, clear and pungent; a scent that seems to penetrate the being, to reach the very heart, and charms it to surrender. The evening wind sprang up behind, and we set our sail and prow for Venice, twenty-five miles away across the pearly grey lagoon. On and on we sailed while the day faded about us, deepening slowly into night. A fiery sunset flamed itself to death behind the Euganean Hills. The expanse of water quickened from grey to crimson, to gold, to orange, to pale burnished copper, dimpled and shadowed by the tiny waves, to purple as the night came down; then all this glory of colour withdrew once more into the pervasive pearly grey, as the last light died in the western heavens, and darkness stole silently over the waters....
It is the people and the place, the union and interpenetration of the two, the sea life of these dwellers in the city that is always ‘just putting out to sea,’ which constitutes for many the peculiar and enduring charm of Venice. The people and the place so intimately intermingled through all their long history, have grown into a single life charged with the richness of sea-nature and the warmth of human emotion. From both together escapes this essence or soul of Venice which we would clasp with all the ardour of a lover. Venice, her lagoons, her seafaring folk, become the object of a passionate idolatry which admits no other allegiance in the hearts that have known its power. To leave her is a sure regret; to return a certain joy.
HORATIO F. BROWN.