of the past, at once
alive and turned to marble, like the Prince of the Black Islands in the
story. And what gives it a peculiar fascination is that its antiquity,
though venerable, is yet modern, and, so to speak, continuous; while
that of Rome belongs half to a former world and half to this, and is
broken irretrievably in two. The glory of Venice, too, was the
achievement of her own genius, not an inheritance; and, great no longer,
she is more truly than any other city the monument of her own greatness.
She is something wholly apart, and the silence of her watery streets
accords perfectly with the spiritual mood which makes us feel as if we
were passing through a city of dream. Fancy now an imaginative young man
from Ohio, where the log-hut was but yesterday turned to almost less
enduring brick and mortar, set down suddenly in the midst of all this
almost immemorial permanence of grandeur. We cannot think of any one on
whom the impression would be so strangely deep, or whose eyes would be
so quickened by the constantly recurring shock of unfamiliar objects.
Most men are poor observers, because they are cheated into a delusion of
intimacy with the things so long and so immediately about them; but
surely we may hope for something like seeing from fresh eyes, and those
too a poet's, when they open suddenly on a marvel so utterly alien to
their daily vision and so perdurably novel as Venice. Nor does Mr.
Howells disappoint our expectation. We have here something like a
full-length portrait of the Lady of the Lagoons.

We have been struck in this volume, as elsewhere in writings of the same
author, with the charm of _tone_ that pervades it. It is so constant as
to bear witness, not only to a real gift, but to the thoughtful
cultivation of it. Here and there Mr. Howells yields to the temptation
of _execution_, to which persons specially felicitous in language are
liable, and pushes his experiments of expression to the verge of being
unidiomatic, in his desire to squeeze the last drop of significance from
words; but this is seldom, and generally we receive that unconscious
pleasure in reading him which comes of naturalness, the last and highest
triumph of good writing. Mr. Howells, of all men, does not need to be
told that, as wine of the highest flavor and most delicate _bouquet_ is
made from juice pressed out by the unaided weight of the grapes, so in
expression we are in danger of getting something like acridness if we
cr