Venetian, most content to leave cheap trippers and other aliens
the high light of the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and
gold. The splendid day is good enough for them; what is
best for you is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among
clustered pali and softly-shifting poops and prows, at a
great flight of water-steps that play their admirable part in the
general effect of a great entrance. The high doors stand open
from them to the paved chamber of a basement tremendously tall
and not vulgarly lighted, from which, in turn, mounts the slow
stone staircase that draws you further on. The great point is,
that if you are worthy of this impression at all, there isn't a
single item of it of which the association isn't noble. Hold to
it fast that there is no other such dignity of arrival as arrival
by water. Hold to it that to float and slacken and gently bump,
to creep out of the low, dark felze and make the few
guided movements and find the strong crooked and offered arm, and
then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass up the few damp steps
on the precautionary carpet--hold to it that these things
constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it may
sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. It's so stately that
what can come after?--it's so good in itself that what, upstairs,
as we comparative vulgarians say, can be better? Hold to it, at
any rate, that if a lady, in especial, scrambles out of a
carriage, tumbles out of a cab, flops out of a tram-car, and
hurtles, projectile-like, out of a "lightning-elevator," she
alights from the Venetian conveyance as Cleopatra may have
stepped from her barge. Upstairs--whatever may be yet in store
for her--her entrance shall still advantageously enjoy the
support most opposed to the "momentum" acquired. The beauty of
the matter has been in the absence of all momentum--elsewhere so