But I recall vividly enough that the response most elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the rather grim admonition that romantic and historic sites, such as the land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a questionable aid to concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of it.

They are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase; they draw him away from his small question to their own greater ones; so that, after a little, he feels, while thus yearning toward them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an army of glorious veterans to help him to arrest a peddler who has given him the wrong change.
There are pages of the book which, in the reading over, have seemed to make me see again the bristling curve of the wide Riva, the large colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated undulation of the little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the wave, of foreshortened clicking pedestrians.

The Venetian footfall and the Venetian cry--all talk there, wherever uttered, having the pitch of a call across the water--come in once more at the window, renewing one's old impression of the delighted senses and the divided, frustrated mind.
How can places that speak IN GENERAL so to the imagination not give it, at the moment, the particular thing it wants?
I recollect again and again, in beautiful places, dropping into that wonderment.

The real truth is, I think, that they express, under this appeal, only too much--more than, in the given case, one has use for; so that one finds one's self working less congruously, after all, so far as the surrounding picture is concerned, than in presence of the moderate and the neutral, to which we may lend something of the light of our vision.
Such a place as Venice is too proud for such charities; Venice doesn't borrow, she but all magnificently gives.

We profit by that enormously, but to do so we must either be quite off duty or be on it in her service alone.