It was the eve of Ascension Day, and a yellow May moon was hanging in the blue. I wished with all my heart that it were a little matter of seven or eight hundred years earlier in the world's history, for then the people would have been keeping vigil and making ready for that nuptial ceremony of Ascension-tide when the Doge married Venice to the sea. Why can we not make pictures nowadays, as well as paint them? We are banishing colour as fast as we can, clothing our buildings, our ships, ourselves, in black and white and sober hues, and if it were not for dear, gaudy Mother Nature, who never puts her palette away, but goes on painting her reds and greens and blues and yellows with the same lavish hand, we should have a sad and discreet universe indeed.
But so long as we have more or less stopped making pictures, is it not fortunate that the great ones of the olden time have been eternally fixed on the pages of the world's history, there to glow and charm and burn for ever and a day? To be able to recall those scenes of marvellous beauty so vividly that one lives through them again in fancy, and reflect, that since we have stopped being picturesque and fascinating, we have learned, on the whole, to behave much better, is as delightful a trend of thought as I can imagine, and it was mine as I floated toward the Piazza of San Marco in my gondola.
I could see the Doge descend the Giant's Stairs, and issue from the gate of the Ducal Palace. I could picture the great Bucentaur as it reached the open beyond the line of the tide. I could see the white-mitred Patriarch walking from his convent on the now deserted isle of Sant' Elena to the shore where his barge lay waiting to join the glittering procession.
And then there floated before my entranced vision the princely figure of the Doge taking the Pope-blessed ring, and, advancing to the little gallery behind his throne on the Bucentaur, raising it high, and dropping it into the sea. I could almost hear the faint splash as it sank in the golden waves, and hear, too, the sonorous words of the old wedding ceremony: "Desponsamus te, Mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii!"
Then when the shouts of mirth and music had died away and the Bucentaur and its train had drifted back into the lagoon, the blue sea, new-wedded, slept through the night with the May moon on her breast and the silent stars for sentinels.