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(From Italy)
THE SUN is setting; his last rays are steeping | |
| In golden hues yon clouds that steadfast keep | |
| Their station on the far horizon sleeping, | |
| Breasting the sky yet blended with the deep: | |
| Lo, from their braided edges glittering creep | 5 |
| Sharp pointed spires, in blue air faintly shown | |
| O’ershadowed as the sea-mists round them sweep; | |
| Away, those azure mists are substant grown, | |
| Fair Venice there reclines upon her ocean-throne! | |
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| Yea, there she sleeps, while on the waters lying | 10 |
| Her spires and gilded domes reflected shine | |
| In the rich lustre shed by twilight dying; | |
| Silent and lone as a deserted shrine | |
| Reared o’er that mirror’s floating hyaline; | |
| Ancestral Venice! earth to her bowed down | 15 |
| Deeming her Roman birth should mock decline: | |
| There still is throned the queen without her crown, | |
| The halo round her forehead of her past renown. | |
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| Enter as in the vision of a dream, | |
| Where all is strange, grotesque, mysterious, wild, | 20 |
| Ye glide through paths that are the ocean stream; | |
| Mid palaces with sea-green weed defiled, | |
| Looking desertion, yet unreconciled | |
| To be the sepulchres of greatness fled: | |
| Where silence is a presence felt, the child | 25 |
| Of desolation, for ye hear no tread, | |
| No shout, no trump, to wake this city of the dead! * * * * * | |
| Yea, all is here romantic, strange and wild, | |
| And mystical and dreamlike: lo, the square | |
| Where domes and spires and minarets are piled, | 30 |
| The ducal hall’s barbaric splendor there, | |
| The steeds of bronze that glitter in the air | |
| Bridled: the towering Campanile’s height | |
| Where Galileo found his starry chair, | |
| And yonder triple shrine that fills the sight | 35 |
| With a strange sense of awe, of marvel, yet delight. | |
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| The Greek, the Goth, the Saracenic twined, | |
| Spires reared o’er Moorish cupolas appear; | |
| The long arched front, with myriad columns lined: | |
| Behold, undisciplined by art severe, | 40 |
| The poetry of architecture here: | |
| Heaped up and as a conqueror’s spoil displayed, | |
| The o’er-crowded wealth of either hemisphere, | |
| Enter, where mantled in her deepest shade | |
| Religion hath her own the sanctuary made. | 45 |
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