Venice is a city of palaces. Three-quarters of them are unoccupied now, save by the stranger within her gates, who hires them for a season. But they are wonderfully beautiful, with their superb architecture and their great variety of colouring. Nothing could be more delightful than a sail down the Grand Canal at sunset, unless it be one by moonlight.
At sunset, after the warmest day, the air is cool. The sky is crimson above you, and the water which laps around your black keel is crimson also. Everybody has come out to enjoy the delicious coolness and shadow. You meet your friends, and exchange greetings with them as you would in the Casino at Florence or the Central Park in New York. The old palaces catch the sunset glory, and glow in it with a splendour as radiant as their memories. Busy waiters are arranging the out-of-door tables in front of the cafés in the grand piazza of San Marco for their evening custom. You drift on and on, till the sunset glory fades, and a new glory, purer and paler, has arisen,—the glory of the moon.
Everybody raves about moonlight in Venice, and well they may, for there is nothing on earth so enchanting. You forget the far-off world,—that old, hard world, where waggons rattle, and horses stumble and fall, and people are tired, and duns harass you, and time and tide wait for no man. In this enchanted Venice, it seems to you, no one is ever sad, or cross, or weary. You think that here, at least, you could be reconciled to an earthly immortality. The feeling is universal. A rich Englishman, while I was there, leased one of the old palaces for twenty-five years to come, and was busily adorning it with gems of art. He put into it old Venetian glasses, strange mirrors with nymphs and roses painted on them, such as were the glory of Venice long ago. His silver was wrought by the men of Benvenuto Cellini’s time. In his hall were marble statues sculptured by long-forgotten hands. His chairs and tables were carved by cunning workmen who had turned to dust. Everything was of the past, except the flowers, which everywhere ran riot. Marble vases, rifled from tombs, were full of glowing crimson roses. Bright-hued blossoms filled the windows, vines trailed over the walls, fragrance as of a thousand gardens flooded the rooms.
‘Twenty-five years!’ cried a friend, who was looking on at the lavish adornment of the old palace. ‘Are you sure you will be contented here so long?’
‘If not, it is hopeless,’ was the answer, ‘for I’ve tried the rest of the world, and found it wanting. Year after year Venice has drawn me back again with her charm, always new, though so old. If she fails to content me, there is nothing left but to go to heaven.’
And there are those who think, having reached Venice, that they have gone very nigh to heaven. At least, let us fancy it is that Island of the Blest which the old voyageurs used to seek....
There are few places more prolific of temptations to the purse than this city by the sea. You could spend a small fortune in photographs; and no photographs are so beautiful as those of Venice, with her water-ways, her sumptuous architecture, and her picturesque gondolas. You go a few steps from the photographer’s, and pause before the window of a shop for the sale of antiquities. If you have any imagination at all, you are fascinated at once. You find here quaint rings, as old as the days of the Doges; lace which generations of by-gone marquises have worn, and which time has turned to the hue of amber; fans behind which the dear, dead women, with their red-gold hair that Titian painted, blushed and bloomed and sighed and flirted. Here are shoe-buckles glittering with diamonds; here, in short, are a thousand relics of a beauty-loving and luxurious past; and you cannot turn away from them until you have bought something by way of talisman, wherewith to conjure back the shades of dead days and faded glories.
You see long lines of shops, full of the Venetian mosaic, and of the Venetian gold-work, which is the daintiest that you can imagine. Here is Salviati’s priceless glass. It is Salviati who has rediscovered the secrets of the old glass-makers. He will tell you that there can be no such thing as a lost art, while the human brain retains its former power; and in this matter of glass-making, at least, he has proved his own theories. Such wonderful colours, such wonderful shapes, such exquisite designs, can be found nowhere else. It almost converts one to Spiritualism, this exceptional success of Salviati’s, and makes you think that the ghosts of some of the old glass-makers have been whispering their long-forgotten secrets into his ears. You have fingered all the morning round this captivating piazza of San Marco, with its shops full of temptations, and now the bronze Vulcans of the clock-tower march out and strike the hour of two, and retire again; and just as they beat their retreat you see one of the prettiest sights in Venice. Long ago—at the beginning of the thirteenth century, so the story runs,—Admiral Dandolo, while besieging Candia, received intelligence by means of carrier-pigeons which greatly aided him. He then sent the birds to Venice with the news of his success; and since that period their descendants have been carefully cherished and greatly prized by the Venetians. Every day, at two o’clock the doves are fed at the expense of the city.... Venice! You can pass your dreamy days there in the luxury of an absolute repose. No other place is like it for beauty, and certainly no other is like it for restfulness.... Gay belles, who have tired themselves out by a busy winter in Rome or Florence, betake themselves to this City of the Sea, and win back their roses in its quiet. Its spell is on you from the first moment you arrive. It seems to me no one could ever leave it willingly; and if only the post could be abolished, and no letters would come to call you back to the world outside, you might stay there for ever without knowing it,—like the monk who laid his ear so close to heaven that he heard in his dream the songs of Paradise, and awoke to find that he had been listening to them for a thousand years.
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.