'azur des ondes
Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
S'enflent comme des gorges rondes
Que souleve un soupir d'amour.

L'esquif aborde et me depose,
Jetant son amarre au pilier,
Devant une facade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier.

How exquisite they were! As one read them, one seemed to be floating
down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black
gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. The mere lines looked
to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as
one pushes out to the Lido. The sudden flashes of colour reminded him
of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the
tall honeycombed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through
the dim, dust-stained arcades. Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he
kept saying over and over to himself:

"Devant une facade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier."

The whole of Venice was in those two lines. He remembered the autumn
that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to
mad delightful follies. There was romance in every place. But Venice,
like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true
romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. Basil had
been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret. Poor
Basil! What a horrible way for a man to die!

He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget. He read
of the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at Smyrna where
the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants
smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he
read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of
granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot,
lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and
white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes
that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood over those
verses which, drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell of that
curious statue that Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "monstre
charmant" that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre. But after a
time the book fell from his hand. He grew nervous, and a horrible fit
of terror came over him. What if Alan Campbell should be out of
England? Days would elapse before he could come back. Perhaps