An Englishwoman's Love-Letters

Sleep well, Beloved, and wake.

Q.

Beloved: I heard somebody yesterday speak of you as "charming"; and I began wondering to myself was that the word which could ever have covered my thoughts of you? I do not know whether you ever charmed me, except in the sense of charming which means magic and spell-binding. That you did from the beginning, dearest. But I think I held you at first in too much awe to discover charm in you: and at last knew you too much to the depths to name you by a word so lightly used for the surface of things. Yet now a charm in you, which is not all you, but just a part of you, comes to light, when I see you wondering whether you are really loved, or whether, Beloved, I only like you rather well!

Truly, Beloved, if I am happy, it is because I am also your most patiently loving.

R.

Beloved: The certainty which I have now that you love me so fills all my thoughts, I cannot understand you being in any doubt on your side. What must I do that I do not do, to show gladness when we meet and sorrow when we have to part? I am sure that I make no pretense or disguise, except that I do not stand and wring my hands before all the world, and cry "Don't go!"—which has sometimes been in my mind, to be kept not said!

Indeed, I think so much of you, my dear, that I believe some day, if you do your part, you will only have to look up from your books to find me standing. If you did, would you still be in doubt whether I loved you?

Oh, if any apparition of me ever goes to you, all my thoughts will surely look truthfully out of its eyes; and even you will read what is there at last!

I love you: you love me: a mist of blessing swims over my eyes as I write the words, till they become one and the same thing: I can no longer divide their meaning in my mind. Amen: there is no need that I should.

S.

Beloved: I have not written to you for quite a long time: ah, I could not. I have nothing now to say! I think I could very easily die of this great happiness, so certainly do you love me! Just a breath more of it and I should be gone.

Good-by, dearest, and good-by, and good-by! If you want letters from me now, you must ask for them! That the earth contains us both, and that we love each other, is about all that I have mind enough to take in. I do not think I can love you more than I do: you are no longer my dream but my great waking thought. I am waiting for no blue-moonrise now: my heart has not a wish which you do not fulfill. I owe you my whole life, and for any good to you must pay it out to the last farthing, and still feel myself your debtor.

Oh, Beloved, I am most poor and most rich when I think of your love. Good-night; I can never let thought of you go!

Beloved: These are almost all of them, but not quite; a few here and there have cried to be taken out, saying they were still too shy to be looked at. I can't argue with them: they know their own minds best; and you know mine.

See what a dignified historic name I have given this letter-box, or chatterbox, or whatever you like to call it. But "Resurrection Pie" is my name for it. Don't eat too much of it, prays your loving.

Saving your presence, dearest, I would rather have Prince Otto, a very lovable character for second affections to cling to. Richard Feverel would never marry again, so I don't ask for him: as for the rest, they are all too excellent for me. They give me the impression of having worn copy-books under their coats, when they were boys, to cheat punishment: and the copy-books got beaten into their systems.

You must find me somebody who was a "gallous young hound" in the days of his youth—Crossjay, for instance:—there! I have found the very man for me!

Dearest, I am not hurt, nor do I take seriously to heart your mother's present coldness. How much more I could forgive her when I put myself in her place! She may well feel a struggle and some resentment at having to give up in any degree her place with you. All my selfishness would come to the front if that were demanded of me.

Do not think, because I leave her alone, that I am repaying her coldness in the same coin. I know that for the present anything I do must offend. Have I demanded your coming too soon? Then stay away another day—or two: every day only piles up the joy it will be to have your arms round me once more. I can keep for a little longer: and the gray hair will keep, and many to-morrows will come bringing good things for us, when perhaps your mother's "share of the world" will be over.

Don't say it, but when you next kiss her, kiss her for me also: I am sorry for all old people: their love of things they are losing is so far more to be reverenced and made room for than ours of the things which will come to us in good time abundantly.

To-night I feel selfish at having too much of your love: and not a bit of it can I let go! I hope, Beloved, we shall live to see each other's gray hairs in earnest: gray hairs that we shall not laugh at, as at this one I pulled. How dark your dear eyes will look with a white setting! My heart's heart, every day you grow larger round me, and I so much stronger depending upon you!

I won't say—come for certain, to-morrow: but come if, and as soon as, you can. I seem to see a mile further when I am on the lookout for you: and I shall be long-sighted every day until you come. It is only doubtful hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. I am as happy as the day is long waiting for you: but the day is long, dearest, none the less when I don't see you.

All this space on the page below is love. I have no time left to put it into words, or words into it. You bless my thoughts constantly.—Believe me, never your thoughtless.

Dearest: How, when, and where is there any use wrangling as to which of us loves the other the best ("the better," I believe, would be the more grammatical phrase in incompetent Queen's English), and why in that of all things should we pretend to be rivals? For this at least seems certain to me, that, being created male and female, no two lovers since the world began ever loved each other quite in the same way: it is not in nature for it to be so. They cannot compare: only to the best that is in them they do love each after their kind,—as do we for certain!

Go to, dearest! There is one thing in which I can beat you, and that is in the bandying of words and all verbal conjurings: take this as the last proof of it and rest quiet. I know you love me a great great deal more than I have wit or power to love you: and that is just the little reason why your love mounts till, as I tell you, it crowns me (head or heels): while mine, insufficient and groveling, lies at your feet, and will till they become amputated. And I can give you, but won't, sixty other reasons why things are as I say, and are to be left as I say. And oh, my world, my world, it is with you I go round sunwards, and you make my evenings and mornings, and will, till Time shuts his wings over us! And now it is doleful business I have to write to you....

My Own Beloved: And I never thanked you yesterday for your dear words about the resurrection pie; that comes of quarreling! Well, you must prove them and come quickly that I may see this restoration of health and spirits that you assure me of. You avoid saying that they sent you to sleep; but I suppose that is what you mean.

Fate meant me only to light upon gay things this morning: listen to this and guess where it comes from:

Ah, but you are no scholar of the things in your own tongue! That is Dunbar, a Scots poet contemporary of Henry VII., just a little bit altered by me to make him soundable to your ears. If I had not had to leave an archaic word here and there, would you ever have guessed he lay outside this century? That shows the permanent element in all good poetry, and in all good joy in things also. In the four centuries since that was written we have only succeeded in worsening the meaning of certain words, as for instance "spleen," which now means irritation and vexation, but stood then for quite the opposite—what we should call, I suppose, "a full heart." It is what I am always saying—a good digestion is the root of nearly all the good living and high thinking we are capable of: and the spleen was then the root of the happy emotions as it is now of the miserable ones. Your pre-Reformation lark sang from "a full stomach," and thanked God it had a constitution to carry it off without affectation: and your nineteenth century lark applying the same code of life, his plain-song is mere happy everyday prose, and not poetry at all as we try to make it out to be.

I avoid saying what news I trust to-morrow's post-bag may contain for me. Every wish I send you comes "from the spleen," which means I am very healthy, and, conditionally, as happy as is good for me. Pray God bless my dear Share of the world, and make him get well for his own and my sake! Amen.

This catches the noon post, an event which always shows I am jubilant, with a lot of the opposite to a "little death" feeling running over my nerves. I feel the grass growing under me: the reverse of poor Keats' complaint. Good-by, Beloved, till I find my way into the provender of to-morrow's post-bag.

Oh, wings of the morning, here you come! I have been looking out for you ever since post came. Roberts is carrying orders into town, and will bring you this with a touch of the hat and an amused grin under it. I saw you right on the top Sallis Hill: this is to wager that my eyes have told me correctly. Look out for me from far away, I am at my corner window: wave to me! Dearest, this is to kiss you before I can.

Dearest: I have made a bad beginning of the week: I wonder how it will end? it all comes of my not seeing enough of you. Time hangs heavy on my hands, and the Devil finds me the mischief!

I prevailed upon myself to go on Sunday and listen to our new lately appointed vicar: for I thought it not fair to condemn him on the strength of Mrs. P——'s terrible reporting powers and her sensuous worship of his full-blown flowers of speech—"pulpit-pot-plants" is what I call them.

I discover that I get "the snaps" on a Monday morning, if I get them at all. The M.-A. gets them on the Sunday itself, softly but regularly: they distress no one, and we all know the cause: her fingers are itching for the knitting which she mayn't do. Your Protestant ignores Lent as a Popish device, a fond thing vainly invented: but spreads it instead over fifty-two days in the year. Why, I want to know, cannot I change the subject?

Sunday we get no post (and no collection except in church) unless we send down to the town for it, so Monday is all the more welcome: but this I have been up and writing before it arrives—therefore the "snaps."

Our postman is a lovely sight. I watched him walking up the drive the other morning, and he seemed quite perfection, for I guessed he was bringing me the thing which would make me happy all day. I only hope the Government pays him properly.

I think this is the least pleasant letter I have ever sent you: shall I tell you why? It was not the sermon: he is quite a forgivable good man in his way. But in the afternoon that same Mrs. P—— came, got me in a corner, and wanted to unburden herself of invective against your mother, believing that I should be glad, because her coldness to me has become known! What mean things some people can think about one! I heard nothing: but I am ruffled in all my plumage and want stroking. And my love to your mother, please, if she will have it. It is only through her that I get you.—Ever your very own.

Dearest: Here comes a letter to you from me flying in the opposite direction. I won't say I am not wishing to go; but oh, to be a bird in two places at once! Give this letter, then, a special nesting-place, because I am so much on the wing elsewhere.

I shut my eyes most of the time through France, and opened them on a soup-tureen full of coffee which presented itself at the frontier: and then realized that only a little way ahead lay Berne, with baths, buns, bears, breakfast, and other nice things beginning with B, waiting to make us clean, comfortable, contented, and other nice things beginning with C.

What a lot I have to go through before we meet again visibly! You will find me world-worn, my Beloved! Write often.

Beloved: You know of the method for making a cat settle down in a strange place by buttering her all over: the theory being that by the time she has polished off the butter she feels herself at home? My morning's work has been the buttering of the Mother-Aunt with such things as will Lucerne her the most. When her instincts are appeased I am the more free to indulge my own.

But just one or two faces stood the test, and were justified: a young man oppressed with the burden of youth; a sweet, toothless grandmother in a bonnet, wearing old age like a flower; a woman not beautiful but for her neck which carried indignation; her face had a thwarted look. "Dead and rotten" one did not say of these in disgust and involuntarily as one did of the others. And yet I don't suppose the eye picks out the faces that kindled most kindness round them when living, or that one can see well at all where one sees without sympathy. I think the Mother-Aunt's face would not look dear to most people as it does to me,—yet my sight of her is the truer: only I would not put it up on a tombstone in order that it might look nothing to those that pass by.

The T——s whittle themselves out of our company just to the right amount: come back at the right time (which is more than Arthur and I are likely to do when our legs get on the spin), and are duly welcome with a diversity of doings to talk about. Their tastes are more the M.-A.'s, and their activities about halfway between hers and ours, so we make rather a fortunate quintette. The M—— trio join us the day after to-morrow, when the majority of us will head away at once to Florence. Arthur growls and threatens he means to be left behind for a week: and it suits the funny little jealousy of the M.-A. well enough to see us parted for a time, quite apart from the fact that I shall then be more dependent on her company. She will then glory in overworking herself,—say it is me; and I shall feel a fiend. No letter at all, dearest, this; merely talky-talky.—Yours without words.

Dearest: I cannot say I have seen Pisa, for the majority had their way, and we simply skipped into it, got ourselves bumped down at the Duomo and Campo Santo for two hours, fell exhausted to bed, and skipped out again by the first train next morning. Over the walls of the Campo Santo are some divine crumbs of Benozzo Gozzoli (don't expect me ever to spell the names of dead painters correctly: it is a politeness one owes to the living, but the famous dead are exalted by being spelt phonetically as the heart dictates, and become all the better company for that greatest of unspelled and spread-about names—Shakspere, Shakspeare, Shakespeare—his mark, not himself). Such a long parenthesis requires stepping-stones to carry you over it: "crumbs" was the last (wasn't a whole loaf of bread a stepping-stone in one of Andersen's fairy-tales?): but, indeed, I hadn't time to digest them properly. Let me come back to them before I die, and bury me in that inclosure if you love me as much then as I think you do now.

The Baptistry has a roof of echoes that is wonderful,—a mirror of sound hung over the head of an official who opens his mouth for centimes to drop there. You sing notes up into it (or rather you don't, for that is his perquisite), and they fly circling, and flock, and become a single chord stretching two octaves: till you feel that you are living inside what in the days of our youth would have been called "the sound of a grand Amen."

The cathedral has fine points, or more than points—aspects: but the Italian version of Gothic, with its bands of flat marbles instead of moldings, was a shock to me at first. I only begin to understand it now that I have seen the outside of the Duomo at Florence. Curiously enough, it doesn't strike me as in the least Christian, only civic and splendid, reminding me of what Ruskin says about church architecture being really a dependant on the feudal or domestic. The Strozzi Palace is a beautiful piece of street-architecture; its effect is of an iron hand which gives you a buffet in the face when you look up and wonder—how shall I climb in? I will tell you more about insides when I write next.

Dearest: The Italian paper-money paralyzes my brain: I cannot calculate in it; and were I left to myself an unscrupulous shopman could empty me of pounds without my becoming conscious of it till I beheld vacuum. But the T——s have been wonderful caretakers to me: and to-morrow Arthur rejoins us, so that I shall be able to resume my full activities under his safe-conduct.

The ways of the Italian cabbies and porters fill me with terror for the time when I may have to fall alive and unassisted into their hands: they have neither conscience nor gratitude, and regard thievish demands when satisfied merely as stepping-stones to higher things.

There is not so much color about as I had expected: and austerity rather than richness is the note of most of the exteriors.

I have not been allowed into the Uffizi yet, so to-day consoled myself with the Pitti. Titian's "Duke of Norfolk" is there, and I loved him, seeing a certain likeness there to somebody whom I—like. A photo of him will be coming to you. Also there is a very fine Lely-Vandyck of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, a quite moral painting, making a triumphant assertion of that martyr's bad character. I imagine he got into heaven through having his head cut off and cast from him: otherwise all of him would have perished along with his mouth.

At Pisa I slept in a mosquito-net, and felt like a bride at the altar under a tulle veil which was too large for her. Here, for lack of that luxury, being assured that there were no mosquitoes to be had, I have been sadly ravaged. The creatures pick out all foreigners, I think, and only when they have exhausted the supply do they pass on to the natives. Mrs. T—— left one foot unveiled when in Pisa, and only this morning did the irritation in the part bitten begin to come out.

I can now ask for a bath in Italian, and order the necessary things for myself in the hotel: also say "come in" and "thank you." But just the few days of that very German table d'hôte at Lucerne, where I talked gladly to polish myself up, have given my tongue a hybrid way of talking without thinking: and I say "ja, ja," and "nein," and "der, die, das," as often as not before such Italian nouns as I have yet captured. To fall upon a chambermaid who knows French is like coming upon my native tongue suddenly.

Give me good news of your foot and all that is above it: I am so doubtful of its being really strong yet; and its willing spirits will overcome it some day and do it an injury, and hurt my feelings dreadfully at the same time.

Walk only on one leg whenever you think of me! I tell you truly I am wonderfully little lonely: and yet my thoughts are constantly away with you, wishing, wishing,—what no word on paper can ever carry to you. It shall be at our next meeting!—All yours.

My Dearest: Florence is still eating up all my time and energies: I promised you there should be austerity and self-denial in the matter of letter-writing: and I know you are unselfish enough to expect even less than I send you.

Girls in the street address compliments to Arthur's complexion:—"beautiful brown boy" they call him: and he simmers over with vanity, and wishes he could show them his boating arms, brown up to the shoulder, as well. Have you noticed that combination in some of the dearest specimens of young English manhood,—great physical vanity and great mental modesty? and each as transparently sincere as the other.

Verocchio's idea of David is charming: he is a saucy fellow who has gone in for it for the fun of the thing—knew he could bring down a hawk with his catapult, and therefore why not a Goliath also? If he failed, he need but cut and run, and everybody would laugh and call him plucky for doing even that much. So he does it, brings down his big game by good luck, and stands posing with a sort of irresistible stateliness to suit the result. He has a laugh something like "little Dick's," only more full of bubbles, and is saying to himself, "What a hero they all think me!" He is the merriest of sly-dog hypocrites, and has thin, wiry arms and a craney neck. He is a bit like Tom Sawyer in character, more ornate and dramatic than Huckleberry Finn, but quite as much a liar, given a good cause.

Another thing that has seized me, more for its idea than actual carrying out, is an unnamed terra-cotta Madonna and Child. He is crushing himself up against her neck, open-mouthed and terrified, and she spreading long fingers all over his head and face. My notion of it is that it is the Godhead taking his first look at life from the human point of view; and he realizes himself "caught in his own trap," discovering it to be ever so much worse than it had seemed from an outside view. It is a fine modern zeit-geist piece of declamation to come out of the rather over-sweet della Robbia period of art.

There seems to have been a rage at one period for commissioning statues of David: so Donatello and others just turned to and did what they liked most in the way of budding youth, stuck a Goliath's head at its feet, and called it "David." Verocchio is the exception.

We are going to get outside Florence for a week or ten days; it is too hot to be borne at night after a day of tiring activity. So we go to the D——s' villa, which they offered us in their absence; it lies about four miles out, and is on much higher ground: address only your very immediately next letter there, or it may miss me.

Beloved: I had your last letter on Friday: all your letters have come in their right numbers. I have lost count of mine; but I think seven and two postcards is the total, which is the same as the numbers of clean and unclean beasts proportionately represented in the ark.

I liked being in Savonarola's room, and was more susceptible to the remains of his presence than I have been to Michel Angelo or anyone else's. Michel Angelo I feel most when he has left a thing unfinished; then one can put one's finger into the print of the chisel, and believe anything of the beauty that might have come out of the great stone chrysalis lying cased and rough, waiting to be raised up to life.

Yesterday Arthur and I walked from here to Fiesole, which we had neglected while in Florence—six miles going, and more like twelve coming back, all because of Arthur's absurd cross-country instinct, which, after hours of river-bends, bare mountain tracks, and tottering precipices, brought us out again half a mile nearer Florence than when we started.

Dearest: We were to have gone down with the rest into Florence yesterday: but soft miles of Italy gleamed too invitingly away on our right, and I saw Arthur's eyes hungry with the same far-away wish. So I said "Prato," and he ran up to the fattore's and secured a wondrous shandry-dan with just space enough between its horns to toss the two of us in the direction where we would go. Its gaunt framework was painted of a bright red, and our feet had only netting to rest on: so constructed, the creature was most vital and light of limb, taking every rut on the road with flea-like agility. Oh, but it was worth it!

We had a drive of fourteen miles through hills and villages, and castellated villas with gardens shut in by formidably high walls—always, a charm: a garden should always have something of the jealous seclusion of a harem. I am getting Italian landscape into my system, and enjoy it more and more.

The cathedral is little and good: damaged, of course, wherever the last three centuries have laid hands on it. At the corner of the west front is an out-door pulpit beautifully put on with a mushroom hood over its head. The main lines of the interior are finely severe, either quite round or quite flat, and proportions good always. An upholstered priest coming out to say mass is generally a sickening sight, so wicked and ugly in look and costume. The best-behaved people are the low-down beggars, who are most decoratively devotional.

We tried to model our exit on a brigand-beggar who came in to ask permission to murder one of his enemies. He got his request granted at one of the side-altars (some strictly local Madonna, I imagine), and his gratitude as he departed was quite touching. Having studiously copied his exit, we want to know whom we shall murder to pay ourselves for our trouble.

Also did I tell you that on Saturday we two walked from here over to Fiesole—six miles there, and ten back: for why?—because we chose to go what Arthur calls "a bee-line across country," having thought we had sighted a route from the top of Fiesole. But in the valley we lost it, and after breaking our necks over precipices and our hearts down cul-de-sacs that led nowhere, and losing all the ways that were pointed out to us, for lack of a knowledge of the language, we came out again into view of Florence about half a mile nearer than when we started and proportionately far away from home. When he had got me thoroughly foot-sore, Arthur remarked complacently, "The right way to see a country is to lose yourself in it!" I didn't feel the truth of it then: but applied to other things I perceive its wisdom. Dear heart, where I have lost myself, what in all the world do I know so well as you?

Beloved: Rain swooped down on us from on high during the night, and the country is cut into islands: the river from a rocky wriggling stream has risen into a tawny, opaque torrent that roars with a voice a mile long and is become quite unfordable. The little mill-stream just below has broken its banks and poured itself away over the lower vineyards into the river; a lot of the vines look sadly upset, generally unhinged and unstrung, yet I am told the damage is really small. I hope so, for I enjoyed a real lash-out of weather, after the changelessness of the long heat.

From now onwards, dearest, you must expect only cards for a time: it is not settled yet whether we stop at Padua on our way in or our way out. I am clamoring for Verona also; but that will be off our route, so Arthur and I may go there alone for a couple of greedy days, which I fear will only leave me dissatisfied and wishing I had had patience to depend on coming again—perhaps with you!

Uncle N. has written of your numerous visits to him, and I understand you have been very good in his direction. He does not speak of loneliness; and with Anna and her brood next week or now, he will be as happy as his temperament allows him to be when he has nothing to worry over.

Dearest: Venice is round me as I write! Well, I will not waste my Baedeker knowledge on you,—you too can get a copy; and it is not the panoramic view of things you will be wanting from me: it is my own particular Venice I am to find out and send you. So first of all from the heart of it I send you mine: when I have kissed you I will go on. My eyes have been seeing so much that is new, I shall want a fresh vocabulary for it all. But mainly I want to say, let us be here again together quickly, before we lose any more of our youth or our two-handed hold on life. I get short of breath thinking of it!

So let it be here, Beloved, that some of our soon-to-be happiness opens and shuts its eyes: for truly Venice is a sleepy place. I am wanting, and taking, nine hours' sleep after all I do!

That is from without: within she becomes too sensuous and civic in her splendor to let me think much of souls. "Rest and be indolent" is the motto for the life she teaches. The architecture is the song of the lotos-eater built into stone—were I in a more florid mood I would have said "swan-song," for the whole stands finished with nothing more to be added: it has sung itself out: and if there is a moral to it all, no doubt it is in Ruskin, and I don't wont to read it just now.

What I want is you close at hand looking up at all this beauty, and smiling when I smile, which is your way, as if you had no opinions of your own about anything in which you are not a professor. So you will write and agree that I am to have the pleasure of this return to look forward to? If I know that, I shall be so much more reconciled to all the joy of the things I am seeing now for the first time: and shall see so much better the second, Beloved, when your eyes are here helping me.

Beloved: The weather is as gray as England to-day, and much rainier. To feel it on my cheeks and be back north with that and warmer things, I would go out in it in the face of protests, and had to go alone—not Arthur even being in the mood just then for a patriotic quest of the uncomfortable. I had myself oared into the lagoons across a racing current and a driving head-wind which made my gondolier bend like a distressed poplar over his oar; patience on a monument smiling at backsheesh—"all comes to him who knows."

Yesterday your friend Mr. C—— called and took me over to Murano in a beautiful pair-oared boat that simply flew. There I saw a wonderful apse filled with mosaic of dull gold, wherein is set a blue-black figure of the Madonna, ten heads high and ten centuries old, which almost made me become a Mariolatrist on the spot. She stands leaning up the bend with two pale hands lifted in ghostly blessing. Underfoot the floor is all mosaic, mountainous with age and earthquakes; the architecture classic in the grip of Byzantine Christianity, which is like the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters, or Ezekiel prophesying to the dry bones.

Bellini goes on being wonderful, and for me beats Raphael's Blenheim Madonna period on its own ground. I hear now that the Raphael lady I raved over in Florence is no Raphael at all,—which accounts for it being so beautiful and interesting—to me, I hasten to add. Raphael's studied calmness, his soul of "invisible soap and imperceptible water," may charm some; me it only chills or leaves unmoved.

Is this more about art than you care to hear? I have nothing to say about myself, except that I am as happy as a cut-in-half thing can be. Is it any use sending kind messages to your mother? If so, my heart is full of them. Bless you, dearest, and good-night.

Dearest: St. Mark's inside is entirely different from anything I had imagined. I had expected a grove of pillars instead of these wonderful breadths of wall; and the marble overlay I had not understood at all till I saw it. My admiration mounts every time I enter: it has a different gloom from any I have ever been in, more joyous and satisfying, not in the least moody as our own Gothic seems sometimes to be; and saints instead of devils look at you solemn-eyed from every corner of shade.

A heavy rain turns the Piazza into a lake: this morning Arthur had to carry me across. Other foolish Englishwomen were shocked at such means, and paddled their own leaky canoes, or stood on the brink and looked miserable. The effect of rain-pool reflections on the inside of St. Mark's is noticeable, causing it to bloom unexpectedly into fresh subtleties and glories. The gold takes so sympathetically to any least tint of color that is in the air, and counts up the altar candles even unto its furthest recesses and cupolas.

I think before I leave Venice I shall find about ten Tintorettos which I really like. Best of all is that Bacchus and Ariadne in the Ducal Palace, of which you gave me the engraving. His "Marriage of St. Catherine," which is there also, has all Veronese's charm of color and what I call his "breeding"; and in the ceiling of the Council Chamber is one splendid figure of a sea-youth striding a dolphin.

Last evening we climbed the San Giorgio campanile for a sunset view of Venice; it is a much better point of view than the St. Mark's one, and we were lucky in our sunset. Venice again looked like a beautified factory town, blue and blue with smoke and evening mists. Down below in the church I met a delightful Capuchin priest who could talk French, and a poor, very young lay-brother who had the holy custody of the eyes heavily upon his conscience when I spoke to him. I was so sorry for him!

Mr. C—— has been good to us and cordial, and brings his gondola often to our service. A gondola and pair has quite a different motion from a one-oared gondola; it is like riding a seahorse instead of a sea-camel—almost exciting, only it is so soft in its prancings.

I must hurry or I shall miss the post that I wish to catch. There seems little chance now of my getting you in Venice; but elsewhere perhaps you will drop to me out of the clouds.