towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the Redentore. Sometimes,
when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon is a fine thing; for then
the sun goes down into the water with a broad trail of bloody red behind
him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had dragged himself landward across
the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and died as he reached the land. But
we (upon whom the idleness of Venice grows daily, and from whom the
Gardens, therefore, grow farther and farther) are commonly content to take
our bit of sunset as we get it from our balcony, through the avenue opened
by the narrow canal opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a
little rainy, when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate
beauty--all tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little
palace on the corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the
Canalazzo, and from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an
airy balcony. When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that
pathetic and angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves
rich in the neighborhood of that part of the "Palace of Art," whereon

"The light aerial gallery, golden railed,
Burnt like a fringe of fire."

And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in not
seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists are always
painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is splendid over
and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga.

It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon the
Grand Canal during the day. But in the hours just before the summer
twilight the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then you may see
whatever is left of Venetian gayety and looking down upon the groups in
the open gondolas may witness something of the home-life of the Italians,