"During my stay here (I continue, without attending to your question) I have been up nearly every day _before the sun_ (about five o'clock), and after working and tearing about the town all day, towards evening I was not sorry to....
"Do you guess how it was I wrote so little?
"Here a little observation obtrudes itself to my notice. Man (for there is nothing like throwing your own frailties on mankind in general) is born with an irresistible tendency to talk _at something or somebody_; eighteen pages back I was talking to nobody; or, if I did address anything, it was that very vague personage, the future; now I find myself getting more and more personal; _you's_, I expect, will soon get up to fifty per cent.
[Sidenote: (Parenthetic Pebble about Gondolas.)]
"Venice! Mighty word, city of endless associations, image that fills the mind! What impressions has it left on me? I shrink from answering a question so difficult to answer _fairly_, and from dissecting a point of such intricate anatomy. Whilst I think it over, I will give you a picture or two to look at; you shall have a peep out of the window where I sit writing. It is early morning, everything is cool and calm, in silent, almost breathless expectation of the not yet risen sun. Before your eyes rises one of the most splendid views in Europe, that of the Grand Canal from the steps of the Academy; the stately, dark green street of waters reflects on its wide-spreading mirror the grey and crumbling palaces, and the lovely form of Sta. Maria della Salute, with her domes of dazzling white. Not a ripple mars its glossy surface, except where, at rare intervals, some silent gondola glides swiftly along, scattering the sparkling drops from its graceful oar, or where, here and there, the playful 'aura mattutina' has left too rough a kiss upon its slumbering cheek. No sound is heard, but the distant, even, measured chimes, that seem to be rocking on the silence of the morning. Along its marge, singly, or clustering in close array beneath roofs of vine-covered trellis, lie the far-famed, ebon-coloured, swiftly gliding gondolas of Venice. 'Gondolas!' Whilst the sun is rising, let me say a word or two on gondolas. It has always excited my great surprise that these barks, which are graceful almost beyond imagination, are, in point of fact, in their present shape the offspring of a period, next to our own, the most execrable in point of taste which the world has produced. I mean the end of the seventeenth, or rather the beginning of the eighteenth century. Yet, so it is. In the time of Carpaccio and the Bellinis they were queer, tolerably uncouth contrivances, about two-thirds of their present length, pointed and equally curved at both ends, so as to resemble as nearly as possible a slice of melon, dead of the cholera. In Titian's day the shape began to taper out a little, and the iron points or knobs, _at both ends_, rose to a greater height, and were enriched with a serrated ornament; but they did not assume their present slender proportions and graceful ornament, _at the prow only_, till the eighteenth century; as also the mysterious and exquisitely comfortable little cabins or coffins, which now surmount them, and which formerly were open _behind and before_, forcing the passenger to sit upright! They contained then the rudiment of an idea of grace, which took its natural growth and development in spite of man. Meanwhile, for I have been watching him, the sun has appeared above the horizon; not that I see his own, real, glorious face, for he is hidden behind an ancient palace, but I see his reflection glowing in the eye of nature. First a gentle, tremulous, golden light began to steal along the dappled morning sky, warning all the little, distant, fleecy clouds to shake their plumes, for that it was going to begin; then, of course, the water took up the tune; and then (it was fit the biggest building should set the example) the 'Salute' assumed a saffron hue, and gradually one by one all the palaces on one side of the Canal, right up to our windows, and, did not you notice? your own face took quite a shine. For a while you yourself and everything round you seems wrapped in a trance; presently you begin to write. How is this? The whole picture begins to dance and quiver. Our Lady della Salute glows with a deeper blush, and trembles. Then, suddenly, her redness vanishes, her glorious countenance sparkles, and she raises her stately form in a garment of burnished silver; the gondolas that nestle round her feet, and hem in the whole length of the Canal, seem like a fillet of sparkling gems around a web of emerald and gold; the sky is a sea of light; the sun is in the wide heavens--it's time for breakfast. Waiter, coffee and rolls!