xxviii INTRODUCTION

work out subjects thoroughly are disagreeable wretches. One only feels as one should when one doesn’t know much about the matter. If I could give you for a few minutes, as you are floating up the canal just now, the kind of feeling I had when I had just done my work, when Venice presented itself to me merely as so many “mouldings,” and I had few associations with any building but those of more or less pain and puzzle and provocation;-Pain of frost-bitten finger and chilled throat as I examined or drew the window-sills in the wintry air; Puzzlement from said window-sills which didn’t agree with the doorsteps, or back of house which didn’t agree with front; and Provocation from every sort of soul or thing in Venice at once,-from my gondoliers, who were always wanting to go home, and thought it stupid to be tied to a post in the Grand Canal all day long, and disagreeable to have to row to Lido afterwards; from my cook, who was always trying to catch lobsters on the doorsteps, and never caught any; from my valet-de-place, who was always taking me to see nothing, and waiting by appointment at the wrong place; from my English servant, whom I caught smoking genteelly on St. Mark’s Place, and expected to bring home to his mother quite an abandoned character; from my tame fish, who splashed the water all over my room and spoiled my drawings; from my little sea-horses, who wouldn’t coil their tails about sticks when I asked them; from a fisherman outside my window who used to pound his crabs alive for bait every morning, just when I wanted to study morning light on the Madonna della Salute; from the sacristans of all the churches, who never used to be at home when I wanted them; from the bells of all the churches, which used always to ring most when I was at work in the steeples; from the tides, which were never up, or down, at the hour they ought to have been; from the wind, which used to blow my sketches into the canal, and one day blew my gondolier after them;¹ from the rain, which came through the roof of the Scuola di San Rocco; from the sun, which blistered Tintoret’s Bacchus and Ariadne every afternoon at the Ducal Palace; and from the Ducal Palace itself, worst of all, which wouldn’t be found out, nor tell one how it was built. (I believe this sentence had a beginning somewhere, which wants an end someotherwhere; but I haven’t any end for it, so it must go as it is.)

There was only one place in Venice which I never lost the feeling of joy in-at least the pleasure which is better than joy; and that was just half way between the end of the Guidecca and St. George of the seaweed, at sunset. If you tie your boat to one of the posts there you can see the Euganeans, where the sun goes down, and all the Alps and Venice behind you by the rosy sunlight: there is no other spot so beautiful. Near the Armenian convent is, however, very good also;

¹ For this incident, see Academy Notes, 1859, No. 160.

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