in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her stagnant quiet, a
practical belief in God's purpose of a great moving, anxious, toiling,
aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as after a while I yielded,
to these influences, a gentle incredulity possesses you, and if you
consent that such a thing is as earnest and useful life, you cannot help
wondering why it need be. The charm of the place sweetens your temper, but
corrupts you; and I found it a sad condition of my perception of the
beauty of Venice and friendship with it, that I came in some unconscious
way to regard her fate as my own; and when I began to write the sketches
which go to form this book, it was as hard to speak of any ugliness in
her, or of the doom written against her in the hieroglyphic seams and
fissures of her crumbling masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine.
I do not so greatly blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so
many sins of omission concerning her, and made her all light, color,
canals, and palaces. One's conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant
elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is more
virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the city,
and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there might
have been some incentive to keep one's thoughts and words from lapsing
into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the whole
hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But now,
what matter?



CHAPTER III.

THE WINTER IN VENICE