at other times had done so a great deal more. It was a much
more important fact, if one were looking at his genius critically,
that he had lived in the days before the general transfusion.
It had happened to me to regret that he had known Europe at all;
I should have liked to see what he would have written without
that experience, by which he had incontestably been enriched.
But as his fate had ordered otherwise I went with him--
I tried to judge how the Old World would have struck him.
It was not only there, however, that I watched him; the relations
he had entertained with the new had even a livelier interest.
His own country after all had had most of his life, and his muse,
as they said at that time, was essentially American.
That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period
when our native land was nude and crude and provincial,
when the famous "atmosphere" it is supposed to lack was not
even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form
almost impossible, he had found means to live and write like one
of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid;
to feel, understand, and express everything.



V


I was seldom at home in the evening, for when I attempted to
occupy myself in my apartments the lamplight brought in a swarm
of noxious insects, and it was too hot for closed windows.
Accordingly I spent the late hours either on the water
(the moonlight of Venice is famous), or in the splendid square