For Some Reason Our Ship Was
Abating The Speed With Which She Had Crossed The Atlantic, And Now She
Was Swimming Along The Mediterranean Coasts So Slowly And So Closely
That It Seemed As If We Could Almost Have Cast An Apple Ashore, Though
Probably We Could Not.
We were at least far enough off to mistake Nice
for Monte Carlo and then for San Remo, but that was partly because our
course was so leisurely, and we thought we must have passed Nice long
before we did.
It did not matter; all those places were alike beautiful
under the palms of their promenades, with their scattered villas and
hotels stretching along their upper levels, and the ranks of shops and
dwellings solidly forming the streets which left the shipping of their
ports to climb to the gardens and farms beyond the villas. Cannes,
Mentone, Ventimiglia, Ospedeletti, Bordighera, Taggia, Alassio: was that
their fair succession, or did they follow in another order? Once more it
did not matter; what is certain is that the golden sun of the soft
January afternoon turned to crimson and left the last of them suffused
in dim rose before we drifted into Genoa and came to anchor at dusk
beside a steamer which had left New York on the same day as ours. By her
vast size we could measure our own and have an objective perception of
our grandeur. We had crossed in one of the largest ships afloat, but
you cannot be both spectacle and spectator; and you must match your
magnificence with some rival magnificence before you can have a due
sense of it. That was what we now got at Genoa, and we could not help
pitying the people on that other ship, who must have suffered shame from
our overwhelming magnitude; the fact that she was of nearly the same
tonnage as our own ship had nothing to do with the case.
After the creamy and rosy tints of those daughters of climate along the
Riviera, it was pleasant to find a many-centuried mother of commerce
like Genoa of the dignified gray which she wears to the eye, whether it
looks down on her from the heights above her port or up at her from the
thickly masted and thickly funnelled waters of the harbor. Most European
towns have red tiled roofs, which one gets rather tired of putting into
one's word paintings, but the roofs of Genoa are gray tiled, and gray
are her serried house walls, and gray her many churches and bell-towers.
The sober tone gratifies your eye immensely, and the fact that your eye
has noted it and not attributed the conventional coloring of southern
Europe to the city is a flattery to your pride which you will not
refuse. It is not a setting for opera like Naples; there is something
businesslike in it which agrees with your American mood if you are true
to America, and recalls you to duty if you are not.
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