I get short of breath
thinking of it!
So let it be here, Beloved, that some of our soon-to-be happiness opens
and shuts its eyes: for truly Venice is a sleepy place. I am wanting,
and taking, nine hours' sleep after all I do!
Outside coming over the flats from Padua, she looked something like a
manufacturing town at its ablutions,--a smoky chimney well to the fore:
but get near to her and you find her standing on turquoise, her feet set
about with jaspers, and with one of her eyes she ravishes you: and all
her campanile are like the "thin flames" of "souls mounting up to God."
That is from without: within she becomes too sensuous and civic in her
splendor to let me think much of souls. "Rest and be indolent" is the
motto for the life she teaches. The architecture is the song of the
lotos-eater built into stone--were I in a more florid mood I would have
said "swan-song," for the whole stands finished with nothing more to be
added: it has sung itself out: and if there is a moral to it all, no
doubt it is in Ruskin, and I don't wont to read it just now.
What I want is you close at hand looking up at all this beauty, and
smiling when I smile, which is your way, as if you had no opinions of
your own about anything in which you are not a professor. So you will
write and agree that I am to have the pleasure of this return to look
forward to? If I know that, I shall be so much more reconciled to all
the joy of the things I am seeing now for the first time: and shall see
so much better the second, Beloved, when your eyes are here helping me.
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