which sacrifice to accident, not to completeness. A rhapsody of
Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues are
finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the
palaces, even if the number of those I find myself able to
remember in the immense array were less insignificant. There are
many I delight in that I don't know, or at least don't keep,
apart. Then there are the bad reasons for preference that are
better than the good, and all the sweet bribery of association
and recollection. These things, as one stands on the Salute
steps, are so many delicate fingers to pick straight out of the
row a dear little featureless house which, with its pale green
shutters, looks straight across at the great door and through the
very keyhole, as it were, of the church, and which I needn't call
by a name--a pleasant American name--that every one in Venice,
these many years, has had on grateful lips. It is the very
friendliest house in all the wide world, and it has, as it
deserves to have, the most beautiful position. It is a real
porto di mare, as the gondoliers say--a port within a
port; it sees everything that comes and goes, and takes it all in
with practised eyes. Not a tint or a hint of the immense
iridescence is lost upon it, and there are days of exquisite
colour on which it may fancy itself the heart of the wonderful
prism. We wave to it from the Salute steps, which we must
decidedly leave if we wish to get on, a grateful hand across the
water, and turn into the big white church of Longhena--an empty
shaft beneath a perfunctory dome--where an American family and a
German party, huddled in a corner upon a pair of benches, are
gazing, with a conscientiousness worthy of a better cause, at
nothing in particular.