flickering on the swimming piazzetta, the barche idle, the gondolier
wrapped in his thread-bare cloak, alone; dreaming of Apennines, with
world-old cities, brown, above the brown sea of dead chestnut boughs;
dreaming of stormy tides, and watchers aloft in lighthouses when day
is finished; dreaming of dead men and women and dead children in the
earth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six feet deep. And then
I lift my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid moon is on the
valley, and the room is filled with spectral light.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is a hospice in an unfrequented
pass, between sad peaks, beside a little black lake, overdrifted with
soft snow. I pass into the house-room, gliding silently. An old man
and an old woman are nodding, bowed in deepest slumber, by the stove.
A young man plays the zither on a table. He lifts his head, still
modulating with his fingers on the strings. He looks right through me
with wide anxious eyes. He does not see me, but sees Italy, I know,
and some one wandering on a sandy shore.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is S. Stephen's Church in Wien.
Inside, the lamps are burning dimly in the choir. There is fog in the
aisles; but through the sleepy air and over the red candles flies a
wild soprano's voice, a boy's soul in its singing sent to heaven.

I sleep, and change my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his
father, the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across
the heath, a little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half
asleep. His father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt,
kisses his fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the
glasses on the table.