Nothing more beautiful can be beheld than these countless water-courses covered with these cups of snow, which share the clear, slowly-rippling streams only with the water-wagtail and the sedge-warbler, the bullrush, and the flag. They resemble exactly the river on which the Virgine delle Rocce drift with their brothers and Claudio. But the peasants push their black, flat-bottomed boats recklessly amongst the silver goblets of the flowers, crashing into them and breaking them with brutal indifference, and raking them into heaps in their boats, to be cast up on to the oozing banks to rot and serve as land manure; the boorish insensibility of the boatmen is typical of their time; the lilies would serve quite as well for manure were they allowed to live out their lovely life, and were not gathered until they were yellow and faded; but they who rake them in do not wait for their natural season of decay; they smash and break them in full flower as they kill birds on the nest in the fields and hedges.
Their fate is like the fate of that greater lily, rosy-red at sunset, which lies cradled on the waters between Mestre and Murano; and which is roughly and painfully being uprooted and destroyed that a pack of foreign traders and native attorneys may wax fat and lay up gold.
No doubt the fate of Venice is common in these days; no doubt, all over the world, capitalists and socialists join hands across the gulf of their differences to unite in the destruction of all that is beautiful, graceful, harmonious, and venerable.
But in Italy such destruction is more sad and shameful than anywhere else in Europe, by reason of the magnificence and glory of her past, and in view of the pitiful fact that the land, which was a Pharos of light and leading to the earth, is now every year and every day receding farther and farther into darkness: that dreadful darkness of the modern world which comes of polluted waters and polluted air, of the breath of poisoned lungs, and the pressure of starving crowds. The basest form of venality, the lowest form of greed, have fastened on her with the tentacles of the devil-fish; and are every hour devouring her.
[1] Révue des Deux Mondes, 1re janvier 1895.
[2] Campanulas, spotted orchis, or foxglove, I suppose. It it characteristic of him that he sighs for an 'unseizable secret,' and does not take the trouble to learn the names of the flowers he sees.
[3] He is writing of Andrea Sperelli in Il Piacere.
[4] This was written by me in 1897; England has not waited long to confirm the truth of it.
[5] A novel called Corleone reproduces Don Orsino, but was published after these pages had been printed. It has been very popular, but in it, unfortunately, Don Orsino is given away deplorably, and turned into a mere romantic lover, which in real life he never would have become.