Letter XXXVI

Dearest: Venice is round me as I write! Well, I will not waste my Baedeker
knowledge on you,--you too can get a copy; and it is not the panoramic
view of things you will be wanting from me: it is my own particular Venice
I am to find out and send you. So first of all from the heart of it I send
you mine: when I have kissed you I will go on. My eyes have been seeing so
much that is new, I shall want a fresh vocabulary for it all. But mainly I
want to say, let us be here again together quickly, before we lose any
more of our youth or our two-handed hold on life. 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.