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globes on the low commercial crowd. Where the two bronze giants keep watch above the mighty clock of St. Mark's and tell the hour with the stroke of their hammers on the great bell, we entered the piazza.

that bacchanal of flowers and moonlight and music and love-words that is the Venetian summer night. Watch them as they rise to stroll awhile on the arms of their cavalieri serventi. Their slender, undulating shapes are draped in white, with the moon-gleam of pearls in the folds of the gossamer veils that cover their heads and shoulders. Their motions form continuous curves. Their features are statuesque in form and repose

The band was playing in the heart of the great square. Before the caffè, rows of chairs and tables extended into the space left free for the passage of saunterers. The strolling people wore that listless look in their eyes, that expres--the eyes such as rarely look you straight in the sion of unconscious but hopeless monotony, which haunts the Venetian faces in repose.

We passed on through the crowd to Florian's, the largest and most famous of the Venetian caffè. At the tables sat ladies in light dresses with black or white veils on their heads, and men with that nameless distinction of carriage that marks the Venetian patrician.

A silence lay on all the brilliant groups. The women leaned back dreamily in their chairs. The fluttering fans were at rest. The men hummed to themselves, in an undertone, the melody that issued from the band, for that ready sympathy and intuitive harmony of the Italian nature renders it impossible for these impassioned organizations to listen in phlegmatic unresponsiveness to the music upon which their youth has fed.

It was the pathos of "La Traviata" that was holding these women spellbound with old memories. The soft night-wind the moonlight streaming upon the colorful front of the cathedral, crystallizing the flowering spires, glittering on the golden horses-the play of light and shadow-the perfume of jasmine and heliotrope, of rose and magnolia-the sensuous sadness of the love-music stealing through the hearts of the listeners-what wonder that the dark eyes under the white cloud-veils grew large and full of mysteries that none could interpret but those who loved them?

How it wailed along the arches and hovered about the lovely heads of the women and made the mouths of the poor working-girls tremble the unutterable sad sweetness of the love-promise! The place was quiet, as though all the gay crowd mourned in sympathy. Just as the wild death-cry wailed from the heart of the piazza, the bell struck the hour-tolling in measure with the passionate dying song, like a peal for the passing of a soul. The bell and the melody died away together in a long, reluctant echo. The women shook the dreams from their hearts with a sigh. It is not strange that they should cast themselves headlong into the emotion of the music. The whole passionate Italian nature is incarnate in Verdi's creations.

There were women seated at those tables who might have served as personifications of

face-dark and passionate like fixed stars-or hard and clear and subtile like strange gems—set in square, white, sculptured lids. When they turn their stately heads to listen to the homage of their cavalieri you would think them serpents slowly lifting their crests to strike. Their bodies sway with their speech. Every gesture is deliberate and significant. It is not coquetry that is in these women of Venice, but fascination, subtile and inexplicable. They are Circes who would change their lovers into swine and look upon them with neither a laugh nor a sneer, but only a passive indifference in their great, mysterious eyes. They have an Eastern look with their pearls and their white veils and their rhythmic gait. They have the charm of a waterfall that glances on for ever, white, mysterious, inscrutable, wreathing itself in shapes perpetually new and never approaching finality. It is the spell of curved lines, of gleams and suggestions, of flowing form-of falsehood so consummate as to be called truth.

The men on whose arms they lean, despite the haughty carriage which has come down to them from the ancestry that ruled the seas, have an air of languor and indifference, of strength wasted upon pleasure. The populace that toils for its bread and knows no leisure but that of Sundays and holidays, distinguishes them by the title of "Florianista "—a bit of plebeian sarcasm. For the Caffè Florian is their day-long haunt. They slumber away their mornings, lounge at noon into the caffè, glance idly at the papers, and discuss the latest scandal or invent a fresh one. Late in the afternoon they repair to the Giardinetto to meet the ladies, who by this time have completed their morning toilet, and have come in their gondole to take the air on the quay. There they walk until dinner-time—a pleasant, lighthearted, courteous company, full of charming graces and dainty touches of concealed gallantry. In the evening they meet again at theatre, opera, or salon, and on summer nights they throng to the piazza.

The Venetians of the last century perceived the inconvenience of exercising hospitality in their homes. They formed themselves into associations called casini which met in the apartments now used as caffè, under the arches of the

piazza. Here they danced, and conversed, and gambled, and held accademie. There was no such thing as domesticity in that latter Venice. The populace lived by preference in the streets, the theatres, the caffè.

A singularly republican feeling shines through this vast assembly of the piazza. At the table next you may be seated your shoemaker, with his hard-working wife and three children devouring pink ices. A beggar touches the elbow of some languid Florianista and craves his cigar-end. A hungry-faced woman passes by, with her child in her arms, devouring with her eyes the coffee that lingers in the cups. Behind you may be seated some hideous old patrician, whose diamonds are the richest in Venice-some beautiful high-born woman renowned for her coquetrysome gray-haired old soldier who is pointed out by the young men for his share in the establishment of Venetian freedom.

A young Florianista who has sought your acquaintance, through a desire to improve himself in foreign tongues, will perhaps join you. He will talk to you of the last opera, the coming regatta, and then he will open for you his vast stores of personal information. In Venice every one who sets foot on the piazza must needs expect to have his family history, embellished and adorned, passed from mouth to mouth, from gondolier to Florianista.

As the people pass in review before you, your Florianista will check them off like portraits in a gallery. The Venetians have two epithets, "antipatico" and "simpatico," to express like or dislike in its collective sense. These adjectives your young student of manners distributes freely throughout his characterizations.

"That handsome giovanotto with his mustaches turned up-lei veda !—he is the cavaliere of that large woman in blue-she is old enough to be his mother, and has five children at home. That tall, sinister-looking man all in black, even to his gloves-you see him? antipatico quanto mai-well, they say he has the gift of the evileye. He is the lover of that ugly old countess with red roses in her hair, and since she has known him she has lost half her fortune.

"Ah! there comes a poet, or at least he would be one. He writes tragedies and pays to have them played. And there is another, that handsome old man with gray beard and scholarly bearing. He is a real one-among our best. And do you see that round-headed man with staring eyes? well, he is the last of the line of Alighieri. It is Dante's blood that is in him. He has the nose of the poet, but not much else. That handsome, fair-haired young fellow? He is our new tenor—a glorious voice-I served my volunteer year with him. Those girls at the

next table are ballerine from the theatre; and those two tall black-eyed women, with the little man for protection, are Russian countesses, and some say socialists."

The old-time hospitality of the city is reproduced in the asylum it offers to all who suffer with broken hearts, broken fortunes, broken reputations. Old Venice was the refuge of all religious and political non-conformists, of all bold experimenters in science, of all misunderstood poets and philosophers. It was then and is now the receptacle for the odds and ends of humanity, stranded on the seashore of the world, waiting for the next tide to wash them off into the ocean, or drag them up beyond the water-mark.

Suddenly a strain burst from the band that wailed and shrieked along the arches like the cries of tortured souls. Through it broke loud tones of command, clear, joyous sounds of praise, soft, tender notes like the voices of young cherubim, with two powerful conflicting elements struggling for the mastery-a noble harmony full of deep and wonderful thoughts that led the souls of the listeners off into the infinite, with its powerful groundwork, and brought them back to their beautiful mortality with the earthly sweetness of its melody. Strange feelings crept over them. The color, and the pleasure, and the music of their Venetian life came up in strange contrast with the infinite and eternal that gazed at them from the deep philosophy of the music. When the notes ceased, loud applause broke from the gathered crowd. Cries echoed under the old portico of "Boito! Viva il Maestro Boito!"

Sheets of red and green flame broke forth at the side of the piazza. The frightened pigeons fluttered from the lintels. At a window above the arches appeared a man's figure. The people recognized it as that of the composer of "Mefistofele." They burst into loud cries of admiration and boisterous hand-beating, and many of them removed their hats. Brave maestro, think no more of the long waiting and watching, the heart-sickness and despair, the mighty vision and the feeble execution! In the hearts of the people, in the depths of their music-filled eyes, sparkle the jewels that form thy royal crown of genius.

The moonlight streamed over the Piazzetta and the white, marvelous wall of the cathedral. It glittered on the great arched window of the palace, brought the white pillars into relief, lay heavy and tangible on the floor of the arched portico, broken by the shadows of the short columns. Against the background of moonlit water rose the two dark columns, with the saint and the lion standing sharply defined against the luminous sky. The great black shaft of San

Giorgio loomed beyond the rippling moon-track. Gondole darted against the bright, liquid distance. Dark human shapes broke the molten whiteness of the open space. There were noise of soft voices and merry laughter, flashing of white veils and dark eyes.

Music floats up from the garden where the lights burn among the trees, deadening the moonglow. Along the curve of the riva gleams a chain of golden lights. Beyond the white undulations of the water burns a lamp on some dark island or distant fishing-boat.

The bridges are white to intensity. Shadows never gather thickly in this summer moonlight. It lurks not under arches; it brings them out into the open and catches them unto its bosom. There is a rich penetration in its touch, a warm, mellow tenderness in its radiation. It dazzles the eyes and the senses; it is like some largelimbed marble Diana, white and warm in irradiating womanhood. I can understand here in Venice the moon-worship of the ancients. I know why the people are warmed into life by her caress, and why she draws their souls to their lips in wild choruses. What are their love-songs and ballads but hymns in honor of the great moon-goddess?

The noisy youths who saunter along the riva, with cracked accordions or worn guitars in their hands, are her votaries. You might take them for young Greeks on their way to wreathe her shrine with flowers, so heroic are their shapes, so full of grace and harmony their songs, so rhythmic their pace. The morrow will find them working for bread in dark shops or on the heated lagoon.

We went down to where the moored gondole were dancing to the rhythmical ripple of the water. We floated along the lagoon to where the great water-way opened, with a mighty dome guarding it, touched with silver, against the translucent sky. The wide space was as a street of molten silver-one row of palaces dark in shadow, the other full in light, with every arch and molding distinct in relief. Shadows wavered in the water from the gondole. The boat-stakes stood, like hooded watchers, in gray half-relief against the arches of the water-gates. A golden light hung here and there from a balcony or a gondola-prow. White arms hung idly over the balconies among the flowers. Dark heads, like those of old warriors, were bent low over jeweled hands. From among the flowers came the tinkling of gui

tars.

From the gardens behind the white balustrades, where the cypresses were dark against the sky, came scents of jasmine and oleander. The plashing of oars, the mellow voice of an idle gondolier breaking into snatches of love

song, the laughter of young throats-such were the echoes of the summer night.

Our gondoliers broke into a melody full of longing and despair. When the strains died away on the lips of one, the other caught it up and sent it echoing far along the moon-track. In it were all the passion and pleading of a Venetian night, so that to hear it was to be steeped in a delicious melancholy, formless, colorless, from which not the gleam of white arches, nor the scent of flowers, nor the glow of moonlight, could arouse you. When it died away, it would seem that all earthly sensation had left you, and only a divine apathy held you in its embrace.

"It is Clorinda's song, signori, from the 'Gerusalemme,'" said the gondoliers, "and we can sing many another verse from the great Tasso."

A gay chorus echoed far down the canal. A boat-load of men and boys, seated, with colored lanterns swinging above their heads, were drifting under the windows of the palaces, singing old ballads. It was a company of workmen who sing about the streets after their day's toil is over. The people call them the "Pittori," perhaps because the tradition lingers in their minds that, in the golden art-time, the painter-lads were wont to roam the streets in companies, with their guitars in their hands and songs on their lips.

"

Signori, look! There is the house of Desdemona, who married the Moor," said the gondolier-a palazzino, narrow and tall, with high arched windows, sculptured like wrought lacework; a great escutcheon high up on the roof; a balcony on the piano nobile, with fine wheelcarving, white and dazzling with gray half-tones. Against the long arches were dark masses of leafage, oleanders with rosy blossoms warming the gray circles of stone, and suggesting the great round windows of cathedrals. Behind the heavy foliage fluttered a white dress. It might have been that of Desdemona, as she waited for the coming of the Moor, with the moon shining on her fair white face. Down in the calle by the side, where the street-lamp breaks the shadow and the lights of the traghetto shrine under the trellis reveal the black shapes of the gondole, stands Iago, wrapped in his cloak, and calls to old Brabantio to guar! his daughter well.

To-night, when the moon shall have set behind the red roofs of the palaces, the girl will steal across the courtyard, and the Moor will meet her on the Campo, and they will hurry into the little sacristy of some neighboring church, perhaps San Maurizio or San Fantin, and there, among the musty vestments and the guttering candles, the priest will bless their union. Then Othello will lead his bride to his home down there on the side-canal, past the white arches

and the great jousting-yard of the Foscari Palace. It is a square palazzo, with arched windows that frown down upon us as the gondola picks its way among the heavy black barges. An air of silence and mystery lies upon it. In a niche of the wall stands an old figure of a warrior, in shield and armor, gazing with wide, vacant eyes straight before him. He knows that he has seen the lovers float at midnight to the water-gate of the dismal house, and has been sworn to secrecy for all time.

We leave the dark palace behind, and return to the wide water-street. In the distance a sheet of red-and-green flame envelops the pale, py

ramidal shape of the Rialto, making of it a precious jewel set in the moon-gold of the water. From under the dark arch ring the oar-strokes and the boat-songs of the Pittori. Above all, floating along the luminous track, caught up by the girl-voices on the balconies and the gondoliers lying in their boats, echoes the sweet mandolin refrain in praise of moonlight wanderings: "Andiam la notte è bella, La luna va spuntar Di quả di là Per la città

Andiamci a trastullar."

CHARLOTTE ADAMS.

MR.

HOW TO POPULARIZE WORDSWORTH.

R. ARNOLD, in the somewhat thin but humorous critical essay on Wordsworth which appears in the new number of "Macmillan's Magazine,' ,"* asserts that ever since Wordsworth's death, in 1852, the influence of his poetry has waned. "To tenth-rate critics," he says, "and compilers for whom any violent shock to the public taste would be a temerity not to be risked, it is still quite permissible to speak of Wordsworth's poetry not only with ignorance, but with impertinence. On the Continent he is almost unknown." And yet-counting only those who are no longer living-Mr. Arnold himself places Wordsworth next to Shakespeare and Milton among our modern poets—i. e., excluding Chaucer, as belonging to a different worldplaces him above Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, Keats. "Wordsworth," says Mr. Arnold, "taking the performance of each as a whole, seems to me to have left a body of poetical work superior in power, in interest, in the qualities which give enduring freshness, to that which any one of the others has left." This is a bold judgment, with which only the few among the lovers of English poetry would agree; and yet if the value of poetry is to be estimated by the degree in which it stimulates with a healthy stimulus, freshens and elevates the hearts of those who know and love it, the present writer at least would be disposed to assign him even a place higher in the roll of English poets, and affirm that, to him at least, a more serious and sensible blank would be left in English literature

* Reprinted in "Appletons' Journal" for August.

by the extinction of Wordsworth's poems than even by the extinction of the grand Puritan classic himself. No doubt the volume of Wordsworth's voice is not so mighty as that of Milton's, nor the music of his verse so rich and various. But the intellectual world in which Wordsworth lived is infinitely more unique and wholesome, more abounding in the healing waters which human nature needs for its rest and refreshment, more thoughtful, and more lucid, than the intellectual world of Milton-and these qualities far more than make up for the matchless volume of Milton's force and the richer music of his speech. Still, we confess to a doubt whether the most perfect test of poetry, as poetry, be the test which would assign to Wordsworth so supreme a place in our literature. And if you judge chiefly by any other test-say, by the degree in which poetry is capable of exciting the imagination of the majority of cultivated men and women-doubtless not only Milton, but Byron and Shelley, perhaps even Burns and Keats and Coleridge, would take rank above him. For it must be admitted, we think, that after allowing all we may for the injudiciousness of Wordsworth's admirers and interpreters, Wordsworth is not, and probably never will be, a popular poet. And here we use the word "popular" not in the sense of appealing to the homeliest hearts, as Burns appeals, but in the sense of having the power to haunt the cultivated fancy, as Byron's "Isles of Greece," and Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark" haunt the fancy of the literary multitude. To some extent, we imagine that the power of a poet must be measured by the extent of the dominion over which he rules; and, so measured, we imagine that

neither our own nor Mr. Arnold's estimate of Wordsworth's place is likely to be accepted by the majority of good literary judges, English or Continental. We doubt, for instance, whether Goethe could ever have been made to enter into Wordsworth's transcendent greatness, or whether there was any element in Goethe to which that greatness could have been made clear. Could Heine have been made to understand it? Could even Sir Walter Scott? Mr. Arnold justly enough says that Scott was "too genuine himself not to feel the profound genuineness of Wordsworth, and with an instinctive recognition of his firm hold on nature, and of his local truth, always admired him sincerely and praised him genuinely"; but there is not a trace of Scott's assigning to Wordsworth anything approaching to the high place which Mr. Arnold assigns, and indeed we think it clear that what Sir Walter most appreciated in Wordsworth's poetry was not by any means its highest level. Take his praise of the poem called "The Fountain "—and subtile and discriminating praise it was—but it was all praise for the dramatic touch in Wordsworth's description of the old man who passes so easily from the mood of melancholy to the mood of almost harebrained mirth, not praise for the strain of noble and passionate melancholy which is the real burden of that beautiful poem. We suspect Scott, though far too fresh and great to miss altogether the freshness and greatness of Wordsworth, would not have placed him very high on the roll of English poets.

And though, undoubtedly, wise exposition might make Wordsworth a far more popular poet than he now is, we are strongly disposed to think that the qualities in which he is greatest will never be those for which the greater number of his readers will admire him. The truth is, that most lovers of poetry look to poetry for immediate imaginative stimulus, just as they look to champagne for immediate nervous stimulus. And the first effect of Wordsworth is not immediate imaginative stimulus, but rather to breathe on us a strangely lucid and bracing atmosphere of solitary power. The highest influence of Wordsworth is, no doubt, a stimulating influence in that sense in which the solitude of the Alps is stimulating, but not in the sense in which the parade of a great army, or the murmur of an agitated multitude, is stimulating. And to get such stimulus as Wordsworth's, you must first pass into a solitude so profound that the chill of it strikes, and perhaps numbs you, so that you become insensible to the mental thrill which would otherwise follow. And here we are speaking of his really highest work, of such poems as the lines written near Tintern Abbey, or the "Ode to Duty"—and not, of course, of that con

siderable admixture of genuine prose which, as Mr. Arnold very justly says, repels many who are quite capable of appreciating his highest work, from ever grappling truly with a poet capable of such miserable humdrum.

If we were to attempt to make Wordsworth as popular as, in the nature of the case, he is ever likely to be, we should begin by reiterating Mr. Arnold's warning against "The White Doe of Rylstone," "The Excursion," and in a less degree against even "The Prelude," and "Peter Bell "—as the poems by which to test Wordsworth; and by confessing at once that in many of these poems passages may be found-like that so humorously referred to by Mr. Arnold in the following criticism—which not only do not prove the poet, but taken by themselves might fairly, though erroneously, be supposed to prove absolute incapacity for poetry:

"

'Finally, the scientific system of thought' in Wordsworth," says Mr. Arnold, "gives us at last such poetry as this, which the devout Wordsworthian accepts:

'O for the coming of that glorious time

When, prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth
And best protection, this imperial realm,
While she exacts allegiance, shall admit
An obligation, on her part, to teach
Them who are born to serve her and obey;
Binding herself by statute to secure
For all the children whom her soil maintains
The rudiments of letters, and inform

The mind with moral and religious truth!' Wordsworth calls Voltaire dull, and surely the production of these un-Voltairean lines must have been imposed on him as a judgment! One can hear them being quoted at a Social Science Congress; one can call up the whole scene. A great room in one of our dismal provincial towns; dusty air and jaded afternoon daylight; benches full of men with bald heads, and women in spectacles; an orator lifting up his face from a manuscript written within and without, to declaim these lines of Wordsworth; and in the soul of any poor child of nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of lamen

tation, and mourning, and woe! But turn we,' as haunters of Social Science Congresses. And let us Wordsworth says, 'from these bold, bad men,' the be on our guard, too, against the exhibitors and extollers of a 'scientific system of thought' in Wordsworth's poetry. The poetry will never be seen aright while they thus exhibit it."

No; Wordsworth's poetry will never be seen aright while it is thus exhibited. But neither, we suspect, will it ever become even as popular as it may yet become, if those who fail to admire Wordsworth are simply told of "the power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in

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