the ruins that are noble we have known plenty that were not, and
moreover there are degrees and varieties: certain monuments,
solid survivals, hold up their heads and decline to ask for a
grain of your pity. Well, one knows of course when to keep one's
pity to oneself; yet one clings, even in the face of the colder
stare, to one's prized Venetian privilege of making the sense of
doom and decay a part of every impression. Cheerful work, it may
be said of course; and it is doubtless only in Venice that you
gain more by such a trick than you lose. What was most beautiful
is gone; what was next most beautiful is, thank goodness, going--
that, I think, is the monstrous description of the better part of
your thought. Is it really your fault if the place makes you want
so desperately to read history into everything?

You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do
it, I should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there
with longer knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and
shimmers, that the night is the real time. It perhaps even
wouldn't take much to make you award the palm to the nights of
winter. This is certainly true for the form of progression that
is most characteristic, for every question of departure and
arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of this perfect
vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the
indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don't
see and all the things you do feel--each dim recognition and
obscure arrest is a possible throb of your sense of being floated
to your doom, even when the truth is simply and sociably that you
are going out to tea. Nowhere else is anything as innocent so
mysterious, nor anything as mysterious so pleasantly deterrent to
protest. These are the moments when you are most daringly