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Show GENOA BY MOONLIGHT. <br><br> From a private letter written by a well known citizen of Detroit to a friend we are permitted to extract the following rhapsodical description of Genoa by moonlight. <br><br> The moon was full and shone upon the sea - a bay under sheltering hills, upon whose slopes rose, terrace upon terrace, a city old, so old, but ah! how beautiful in the moonlight. Into it I walked, through a street so narrow I could span it with two steps, between houses so lofty that the narrow strip of sky was almost lost, dwindling to a ribbon of blue with here and there a star looking brighter than with us at home. Houses whose lofty stories mounted 100 feet before they combed over into the graceful cornices. A street that led up, up, like a stair, with pavement slippery with damp, the polish of many feet and age, till, in a while I turned suddenly into a wider street, brilliant with gas-light and bordered with marble palaces whose carved fronts stretched along the way, on either side, for miles. Great facades with lofty portals of sculptured marbles opening into vestibules of columns, church-like in size and height - these opening into grand courts still richer in colonnades and magnificent, with royal stairways all white, all marble, all cold, all still, as if the life that had ebbed and flowed in those courts had gone, as if the pride that had reared those piles had vanished, as if the riches that had spent itself in these palaces had been buried, as if these dwellings were inhabited now only by by the ghosts of their former owners which might walk by night, but at daybreak would stiffen into the statues standing here and there so cold and white. It seemed as if these great ???? - emblems of the age, strength, riches, pride and arrogance of the cities' dukes, princes, doges - were then sentient of a sadness (impressed to me) as they looked out upon that bay - out upon that seas, waiting for it to bring back again the glories it had long ago brought from the Orient, but which they mournfully felt might never come again. <br><br> The scene changes and I am in a grand temple, whose arched nave is bounded by lofty columns of colored marble, whose arch is dazzling with mosaics and gold, whose dome rises like a sky, in which hang frescoed saints, whose pavement in many-hued frescoed stones, and then I see a face - a sweet, sad face (quiet, wistful, liquid eyes, hair like night), and I am fascinated by it. I build fancy upon fancy out of that face; it haunts me. I chance to look aside, and when I seek that face again ‘tis gone! My live Madonna of the city by the sea. <br><br> And I dwell in a princely house two days. My chamber has mosaic floors and its arched ceiling is rich with frescoes by old masters. I go up and down grand old marble stairways, I read in the room which was the salon of some princely family, whose portraits yet look down from its walls; I dine in a lofty hall in which may have dined kings and ambassadors. <br><br> And this is Genoa - and the land is Italy. -Detroit Free Press. |