lowed close and
loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and when at
last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across
which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine
veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was
no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the
visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to
forget the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well
might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to
the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the
waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her
state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all
which in Nature was wild or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as
the waves and tempests--had been won to adorn her instead of to
destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty
which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the
hour-glass as well as of the sea."

It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the sea on a
September morning as I sailed towards it across the Adriatic from
Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its loveliness was slowly and
exquisitely unveiled under the slanting beams of the early sun.

In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision so
enchanting and unsurpassable! May you live to see it, Antony, before
the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its beauty.

Your loving old
G.P.

29

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Born in Devon at the same time--within a year--as Ruskin, James
Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same sanguine and
poetical characteristics. His historical writings have, I believe, been
somewhat discredited of late years owing to the permission he is
alleged to have given himself to warp his account of events in order to
buttress some prejudice or contention of his own.

But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once restore
him to our regard as a lord of visionary language:--

"Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping, mellow
autumn of a rich, glorious summer. In the old man Nature has
fulfilled her work; she leads him with her blessings; she fills
him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to
the gr