that he had been spending the summer just where I found him, I
could have assaulted him for very envy. He was painting forsooth
the interior of St. Mark's. To be a young American painter
unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied
with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye;
fond of colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance
between them; of old lace and old brocade and old furniture (even
when made to order); of time-mellowed harmonies on nameless
canvases and happy contours in cheap old engravings; to spend
one's mornings in still, productive analysis of the clustered
shadows of the Basilica, one's afternoons anywhere, in church or
campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's evenings in star-light
gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly
between the two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low
black domes of the church--this, I consider, is to be as happy as
is consistent with the preservation of reason.

The mere use of one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough, and
generous observers find it hard to keep an account of their
profits in this line. Everything the attention touches holds it,
keeps playing with it--thanks to some inscrutable flattery of the
atmosphere. Your brown-skinned, white-shirted gondolier, twisting
himself in the light, seems to you, as you lie at contemplation
beneath your awning, a perpetual symbol of Venetian "effect." The
light here is in fact a mighty magician and, with all respect to
Titian, Veronese and Tintoret, the greatest artist of them all.
You should see in places the material with which it deals--slimy
brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay. Sea and
sky seem to meet half-way, to blend their tones into a soft
iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred