Chapter XXXVI: 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.

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.

Here is love, dearest! help yourself to just as much as you wish for; though all that I send is good for you! No letter from you since Florence, but I am neither sad nor anxious: only all the more your loving.