May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all. Then the days are hot, but not too hot, and the nights are more beautiful than the days. Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning, and more golden than ever as the day descends. It seems to expand and evaporate, to multiply all its reflections and iridescences. Then the life of its people and the strangeness of its constitution become a perpetual comedy, or, at least, a perpetual drama. Then the gondola is your sole habitation, and you spend days between sea and sky.
HENRY JAMES.
HOW SPRING COMES TO VENICE
Venice, 1st May, 1834.
My friend, you have no idea of what Venice is. She has not quitted the mourning garb she assumed in winter, when you saw her ancient pillars of Greek marble, which in colour and form you compared to dry bones. At present, spring has breathed upon her, as though her breath were emerald dust. The base of her palaces, where oysters clustered in the stagnant moss, is now covered with the most tender green, and gondolas float between two banks of this verdure, soft as velvet, and the noise of the water dies away languishingly, mingled with the foam of the gondola’s track. All the balconies are filled with vases of flowers; and the flowers of Venice, brought to light in this warm clayey soil, blossoming in this damp atmosphere, have a freshness, a richness of tissue, and a languor of attitude which makes them resemble the women of this climate, whose beauty is brilliant and evanescent as their own. The double flowering bramble climbs round every pillar, and suspends its garlands of white rosettes, from the black arabesques of the balconies. The vanilla iris, the Persian tulip, so beautifully striped with pure red and white that it seems formed from the material in which the ancient Venetians used to dress; Greek roses, and pyramids of gigantic campanulas are heaped in the vases which cover the balustrades. Sometimes there is quite an arbour of honeysuckle crowning the balcony from one end to the other, and two or three cages hidden in the foliage, contain nightingales that sing day and night, as though they were in the open country. These tame nightingales are a luxury peculiar to Venice. The women there have a remarkable talent for bringing up and educating, so to speak, these poor harmonious prisoners, and know how, by every species of delicacy and kindness, to soften the ennui of their captivity. In the night, the birds call to and answer one another from each side of the canal. If a serenade passes, they are quiet and listen, and as soon as it has passed by, they recommence their song, and seem vying to surpass the melody they have just heard. At every street corner, the Madonna shelters her mysterious lamp under a jasmine canopy; and the traghetti, shaded by trellises, diffuse, all along the Grand Canal, the perfume of the vine in flower, perhaps the sweetest odour among plants.
These traghetti are the stations for the public gondolas. Those which are established on the shores of the Canalazzo are the rendezvous of the porters who come to smoke and talk with the gondoliers. These often present very theatrical-looking groups. Whilst one, lying on his gondola, alternately smiles and yawns at the stars, another on the shore, with open breast, and air of mockery, his hat thrust back upon a forest of long crisp curled hair, throws his great shadow on the wall. He is the hero of the traghetto.
GEORGE SAND.
SPRING IN VENICE
The way in which the spring made itself felt upon the lagoon was full of curious delight. It was not so early in the season that we should know the spring by the first raw warmth in the air, and there was as yet no assurance of her presence in the growth—later so luxuriant—of the coarse grasses of the shallows. But somehow the spring was there, giving us new life with every breath. There were fewer gulls than usual, and those we saw sailed far overhead, debating departure. There was deeper languor in the laziness of the soldiers of finance, as they lounged and slept upon their floating custom-houses in every channel of the lagoons; and the hollow voices of the boatmen, yelling to each other as their wont is, had an uncommon tendency to diffuse themselves in echo. Over all, the heavens had put on their summer blue, in promise of that delicious weather which in the lagoons lasts half the year, and which makes every other climate seem niggard of sunshine and azure skies. I know we have beautiful days at home—days of which the sumptuous splendour used to take my memory with unspeakable longing and regret even in Italy;—but we do not have, week after week, month after month, that
‘Blue, unclouded weather,’