It is a long novel, and I was long in writing it; I remember being again much occupied with it, the following year, during a stay of several weeks made in Venice. I had rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn‘t come into sight.
- P11