Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its brown-cloaked peasant,
basking face-downward in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are by
right the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in
their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated by
the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamors at
the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard of
_valets de place_. Even the play of the children ceases, except in
the Public Gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games,
and sport as noiselessly as the lizards that slide from shadow to shadow
and glitter in the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses
you,--the stranger in it,--not with sadness, not with melancholy, but with
a deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference to all
purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on men's
tongues, behold! that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise would
strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a wild and
frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her inmost
heart, and you learn her secrets--arcana unintelligible to you in the
new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win new
color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once charmed
away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your motion.
Now, at last, you know _why_

"It was an Abyssinian maid"

who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu? It is the land in which you were
born!

The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail
faints into the white distance; the gondola slides athwart the sheeted
silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes