need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I would not
wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and alien to the
place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the first. I believe it
was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the beautiful that I here
found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full of society and friendship,
speaking a language which, even in its unfamiliar forms, I could partly
understand, and at once making me citizen of that Venice from which I
shall never be exiled. It was not in the presence of the great and famous
monuments of art alone that I felt at home--indeed, I could as yet
understand their excellence and grandeur only very imperfectly--but
wherever I wandered through the quaint and marvelous city, I found the
good company of

"The fair, the old;"

and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and I
learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of
relief.

My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of
locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or
destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest,
crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left me
cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible from
the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for my
blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to surrender
by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden brinks of
canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable churches of the
city were equally victorious, and continually took me prisoner. But all
places had something rare and worthy to be seen: if not loveliness of