not linger in her ways--they pass on to Pisa. Genoa has too little to
show them, and too much. She is not a museum, she is a city, a city of
life and death and the business of the world. You will never love her as
you will love Pisa or Siena or Rome or Florence, or almost any other
city of Italy. We do not love the living as we love the dead. They press
upon us and contend with us, and are beautiful and again ugly and
mediocre and heroic, all between two heart beats; but the dead ask only
our love. Genoa has never asked it, and never will. She is one of us,
her future is hidden from her, and into her mystery none has dared to
look. She is like a symphony of modern music, full of immense gradual
crescendos, gradual diminuendos, unknown to the old masters. Only Rome,
and that but seldom, breathes with her life. But through the music of
her life, so modern, so full of a sort of whining and despair in which
no great resolution or heroic notes ever come, there winds an old-world
melody, softly, softly, full of the sun, full of the sea, that is always
the same, mysterious, ambiguous, full of promises, at her feet.

III

The gate of Italy, I said in speaking of her, and indeed it is one of
the derivations of her name Genoa,--Janua the gate, founded, as the
fourteenth-century inscription in the Duomo asserts, by Janus, a Trojan
prince skilled in astrology, who, while seeking a healthy and safe place
for his dwelling, sailed by chance into this bay, where was a little
city founded by Janus, King of Italy, a great-grandson of Noah, and
finding the place such as he wished, he gave it his name and his power.
Now, whether the great-grandson of Noah was truly the original founder
of the city, or Janus the Trojan, or another, it is certainly older than
the Christian religion, so that some have thought that Janus, that old
god who once presided at the beginning of all noble things, was the