Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 December 1892 — VENTIAN LIFE. [ARTICLE]

VENTIAN LIFE.

I The Poetical City Described as the Most Beautiful of Tombs. Venetian life, in the large o’d sense, has long since come to an end, and the esential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides simply in its being the most beautiful of tornbs, writes Henry James in Scribner. Nowhere else has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and remembrance. Nowhere else is the present so alien, so discontinuous, so like a crowd in a cemetery without garlands for the graves. It has no flowers in Us hands, but as a compensation, perhaps—and the thing is doubtless more to the point—it has money aud little red books. The everlasting shuffle in the piazza of these irresponsible visitors is contemporary Venetian life. Everything elso is only a reverberation of that. DThe vast mausoleum has a turnstile a,t the door, and a functionary in a shabby uniform lets you in, as per tariff, to see how dead it is. Erom this constation, this cold curiosity, proceed all the industry, the prosperity, the vitality of the place. The shopkeepers and gondoliers, the beggars and the models, depend upon it for a living; they are thecustodiuns and the ushers of the great museum—they aro even themselves to a certain extent the objects of exhibition. The present tortune of Venice, the lamentable difference, is most eas'd} measured there, end that is wfyy, in the effort to resist our pessimism, wc must turn away both from the purchasers and from the venders of ricordi.