vast churches, and old tombs--a new
sensation, a new memory, a new mind came upon me. Venice is a bit of my
brain from this time. My dear Forster, if you could share my transports
(as you would if you were here) what would I not give! I feel cruel not
to have brought Kate and Georgy; positively cruel and base. Canaletti
and Stanny, miraculous in their truth. Turner, very noble. But the
reality itself, beyond all pen or pencil. I never saw the thing before
that I should be afraid to describe. But to tell what Venice is, I feel
to be an impossibility. And here I sit alone, writing it: with nothing
to urge me on, or goad me to that estimate, which, speaking of it to
anyone I loved, and being spoken to in return, would lead me to form. In
the sober solitude of a famous inn; with the great bell of Saint Mark
ringing twelve at my elbow; with three arched windows in my room (two
stories high) looking down upon the grand canal and away, beyond, to
where the sun went down to-night in a blaze; and thinking over again
those silent speaking faces of Titian and Tintoretto; I swear (uncooled
by any humbug I have seen) that Venice is _the_ wonder and the new
sensation of the world! If you could be set down in it, never having
heard of it, it would still be so. With your foot upon its stones, its
pictures before you, and its history in your mind, it is something past
all writing of or speaking of--almost past all thinking of. You couldn't
talk to me in this room, nor I to you, without shaking hands and saying
'Good God my dear fellow, have we lived to see this!'"

Five days later, Sunday the 17th, he was at Lodi, from which he wrote to
me that he had been, like Leigh Hunt's pig, up "all manner of streets"
since he left his palazzo; that with one exception he had not on any
night given up more than five hours to rest; that all the days except
two had been bad ("the last two foggy as Blackfriars-bridge on Lord
Mayor's day"); and that the cold had been dismal. But what cheerful,
keen, observant eyes he carried everywhere; and, in the midst of new and
unaccustomed scenes, and of objects and remains of art for which no
previous study had prepared him, with what a delicate play of
imagination and fancy the minuteness and accuracy of his ordinary
vision was exalted and refined; I think strikingly shown by the few
unstudied passages I am preserving from these friendly letters. He saw
everything for himself; and from mistakes in judging for hims