The sentiment of the following verses will show how maudlin the song really is: I a girl have seen, Very pretty and very graceful, All neatness, and oh! so kind: A piece of sugar she is to my mind! Oh, how sweet is that mouth ! Oh, how dear is that smile! After all, take them as we may, look at them through what coloured spectacles we will, there is a charm about these bronzed sons of the Adriatic, we dare not deny, we cannot investigate. The people and the place are so united, they are always hovering as it were on the brink of the ocean. Venice itself so endears itself to the heart of all who spend even a short time in it that, to quote the words of one of her most poetical of lovers, "to leave her is a sure regret, to return a certain joy." From morning to night there is a sense of delight in this fairest gem of the Adriatic; in the morning there is the charm of watching the arrival of the gondolas with their cargo of fresh flowers and fruit. To-night their boats must seek the sea, In the evening the clash and the clamour of the church bells, the splash of the oars, the myriad lights, the clear sunset glow, and the strong odour of the sea-there is a unique and a lasting charm about all this which many a mightier city envies. It may not be uninteresting to quote one of the strophes of Tasso, mentioned before as having been sung by the gondoliers. This is from Tasso's "Jerusalem," and it used to be sung alternately by the boatmen, and now and again we may come upon an elderly gondolier who was once familiar with it: THE VENETIAN VERSION. L' arme pietose de cantar glio vogia, Long ago the boatmen on the Venetian canals used to while away the night by singing in turn. One gondolier would begin with a strophe of Ariosto's set to a melody from one of the operas, a comrade would take up the next verse, and so on. Many of their voices are very shrill, so much so that the effect is often far from pleasing; but then, is not the singer a gondolier, and are not the terms synonymous? At such times as the celebration of wedding festivities the gondoliers hold a regular festival of song. They essay quite complicated contrapuntal pieces, such as in our country we should term madrigals; and almost incessantly the refrain is, "Venezia, gemma Triatica, sposa del mar," while barcaroles, serenades, love-songs, and invitations to the waters are interwoven for relief. Sometimes the songs are very sad in motive. One, a very much beloved one too, repeats almost at every line, "Ohimé ! mia madre morí," and another runs, "Perchè tradirmi, perchè lasciarmi? Prima d' amarmi non eri così." This latter, as may be imagined, is the love-lament of a woman. Mr. J. A. Symonds, in writing of these Venetian boatmen, in a contemporary for 1882, says of them that they have a passionate love for operas, which they indulge to the utmost. "These operatic reminiscences have lost something of their theatrical formality, and assumed instead the serious gravity, the quaint movement, and the marked emphasis which belong to popular music in Northern and Central Italy. An antique character was communicated even to the recitative of Verdi by slight, almost indefinable changes of rhythm and accent." The watermen of Venice are all born improvisateurs, and they will set a legend of the Virgin to a false movement or a love-ditty to a polonaise with the greatest facility. In a word, life means song, and song means life to these Adriatic ferrymen. And why? Because life in a gondola is a form of slow music. In one unbroken passage borne To closing night from opening morn, How light we move, how softly! Ah! No wonder that such impressionable men as these gondoliers should be readily and strongly influenced by music. All natures at times prove responsive to this divinest of heaven's maidens, and most nations own her idyllic sway; the phlegmatic Englishman, the volatile French, the reckless Hungarian, the calculating Muscovite, all admit the charm of music. Nay, even For the tired slave song lifts the languid oar, And bids it aptly fall with chime That beautifies the fairest shore, And mitigates the harshest crime. 1 Clough. LAURA ALEX. SMITH. THE GATEWAY OF A CONTINENT. “T HE rapid accumulation of wealth in New York," said the late Richard Grant White, writing in 1883, " is at last accompanied by the appearance of a few gifted architects, who promise within the next ten years to relieve modern Manhattan from the reproach of being at once one of the largest and richest and one of the ugliest cities in the world." 1 More than seven of these years of promise have now passed, and the city, whose growth has always proceeded by a perpetual process of rending itself to pieces, has continued that radical mode of rejuvenation with an energy hitherto unparalleled. What thus far has been the result? Does it point to an early removal of the reproach of ugliness, or is that "blight" which commonly attends the modern art-efforts of the English race manifestly apparent in it? Of course, it is not to be supposed that a few "gifted architects" have been responsible for the whole course of the architectural renascence in New York, but, looking upon it as the outcome of many forces and motives, we may ask how far it has escaped the "Anglo-Saxon contagion," and whether another epoch of razing and rending will be necessary to make the city beautiful in the eyes of the nations. The question is one of peculiar interest to Englishmen, from the fact that this "race infection" has long been actively operative here. Its wicked works multiply on every hand, nor is the American critic's lament for the lost city of his youth and college days any more sorrowful than Mr. Ruskin's for the defaced villages of his own early love for Beddington and Carshalton, with " their sweet expression of human character and life" and their "divinely singing" waters. If I quote somewhat freely from Mr. White before attempting to answer the question I have propounded, it is because his testimony to the pleasant characteristics of "Old New York"-the "elegant domesticity" of its houses and the beauty of its environment-shows that the task laid upon the few gifted persons referred to was one of "Old New York and its Houses," R. G. White, Century Magazine, October 1883. the nature of a restoration. His picture of the older city, before it was "swept out of existence by the great tidal wave of its own material prosperity," causes sharp regret that any such labour should be necessary. "The Bay of New York," he says, and he is confirmed by ample evidence, was once one of the famous natural objects of the world's admiration. It was the pride of those who dwelt upon its banks; and strangers who had seen the Bay of Naples and the Golden Horn did not stint their praises of the beauty surrounded by which New York sat, like a Western Venice, upon the waters.” Grandeur, he admits, the scene did not possess-for the highest hills upon its shores do not exceed 400 feet; "but, this defect excepted, it does not seem that there could be in the world a more inspiring sight than the approach to New York formerly was, whether from sea, or sound, or river." The bay and most of the adjacent waters had then the great charm of natural shores and "verdure that came down to the water's edge"; its many islands "sat like little gems upon its bosom, roughly enamelled with bits of warlike masonry"; a few tide and wind mills varied the scene, and cows still fed upon the banks. Passing these refreshing pictures on any pleasant morning, the city at length came into view, the sharp southern end of Manhattan Island "piercing the waters like a huge wedge of masonry, Castle Garden with the great elms of the Battery at its point. The dark sharp spire of Trinity-old Trinity-shot up, and although only to a moderate height, yet with enough incisiveness and self-assertion to give character to the sky-line of the city," relieved still further by other steeples, cupolas, and towers; while both sides of the narrow island "bristled with masts that stood as close as the canes in some Brobdingnagian brake." This wedge of masonry was the New York of early Republican days-a little city pleasantly resting amid waters which were still pure and suburbs which were still picturesque: a city possessing what it does not possess now, a "distinctively American community," distinguished for "courtliness, culture, and character," and for "much courtesy if some stiffness," and a modest and appropriate style of architecture-houses which, though mostly very "simple in their exterior," had an air of "large and elegant domesticity" not to be found in Fifth Avenue, and looked, as they were, the houses of people of sense, taste, and refinement. Altogether the picture is one of an almost ideal metropolis in miniaturea microcosm having all the members and parts of the larger organism, except the buildings and institutions of a national seat of government; but unluckily a picture at the first glance perilously easy of effacement |