As Tony advanced in years and experience this childish mumming lost
its magic; but not so the early imaginings it had excited. For the
old picture had been but the spring-board of fancy, the first step
of a cloud-ladder leading to a land of dreams. With these dreams the
name of Venice remained associated; and all that observation or
report subsequently brought him concerning the place seemed, on a
sober warranty of fact, to confirm its claim to stand midway between
reality and illusion. There was, for instance, a slender Venice
glass, gold-powdered as with lily-pollen or the dust of sunbeams,
that, standing in the corner cabinet betwixt two Lowestoft caddies,
seemed, among its lifeless neighbours, to palpitate like an impaled
butterfly. There was, farther, a gold chain of his mother's, spun of
that same sun-pollen, so thread-like, impalpable, that it slipped
through the fingers like light, yet so strong that it carried a
heavy pendant which seemed held in air as if by magic. _Magic!_ That
was the word which the thought of Venice evoked. It was the kind of
place, Tony felt, in which things elsewhere impossible might
naturally happen, in which two and two might make five, a paradox
elope with a syllogism, and a conclusion give the lie to its own
premiss. Was there ever a young heart that did not, once and again,
long to get away into such a world as that? Tony, at least, had felt
the longing from the first hour when the axioms in his horn-book had
brought home to him his heavy responsibilities as a Christian and a
sinner.
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