NIGHT in Venice! A night of silver moons,—one hung against the velvet blue of the infinite, fathomless sky, the other at rest in the still sea below.
A night of ghostly gondolas, chasing specks of stars in dim canals; of soft melodies broken by softer laughter; of tinkling mandolins, white shoulders, and tell-tale cigarettes. A night of gay lanterns lighting big barges, filled with singers and beset by shadowy boats, circling like moths or massed like water-beetles. A night when San Giorgio stands on tip-toe, Narcissus-like, to drink in his own beauty mirrored in the silent sea; when the angel crowning the Campanile sleeps with folded wings, lost in the countless stars; when the line of the city from across the wide lagoons is but a string of lights buoying golden chains that sink into the depths; when the air is a breath of heaven, and every sound that vibrates across the never-ending wave is the music of another world.
No pen can give this beauty, no brush its color, no tongue its delight. It must be seen and felt. It matters little how dull your soul may be, how sluggish your imagination, how dead your enthusiasm, here Nature will touch you with a wand that will stir every blunted sensibility into life. Palaces and churches,—poems in stone,—canvases that radiate, sombre forests, oases of olive and palm, Beethoven, Milton, and even the great Michael himself, may have roused in you no quiver of delight nor thrill of feeling.
But here,—here by this wondrous city of the sea,—here, where the transcendent goddess of the night spreads her wings, radiant in the light of an August moon, her brow studded with stars,—even were your soul of clay, here would it vibrate to the dignity, the beauty, and the majesty of her matchless presence.
SAN GIORGIO STANDS ON TIP-TOE
As you lie, adrift in your gondola, hung in mid-air,—so like a mirror is the sea, so vast the vault above you,—how dreamlike the charm! How exquisite the languor! Now a burst of music from the far-off plaza, dying into echoes about the walls of San Giorgio; now the slow tolling of some bell from a distant tower; now the ripple of a laugh, or a snatch of song, or the low cooing of a lover’s voice, as a ghostly skiff with drawn curtains and muffled light glides past; and now the low plash of the rowers as some phantom ship looms above you with bow-lights aglow, crosses the highway of silver, and melts into shadow.
Suddenly from out the stillness there bursts across the bosom of the sleeping wave the dull boom of the evening gun, followed by the long blast of the bugle from the big warship near the arsenal; and then, as you hold your breath, the clear deep tones of the great bell of the Campanile strike the hour.
Now is the spell complete!