Venice once was dear,
	The pleasant place of all festivity,
	The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.

Byron.    

	In Venice, Tasso’s echoes are no more,
	And silent rows the songless gondolier;
	Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
	And music meets not always now the ear.

Byron.    

	White swan of cities, slumbering in thy nest
	So wonderfully built among the reeds
	Of the lagoon, that fences thee and feeds,
	As sayeth thy old historian and thy guest!

Longfellow.    

	I loved her from my boyhood; she to me
	Was as a fairy city of the heart,
	Rising like water-columns from the sea,
	Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart;
	And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare’s art,
	Had stamp’d her image in me.

Byron.    

	The sylphs and ondines
	And the sea-kings and queens
	Long ago, long ago, on the waves built a city,
	As lovely as seems
	To some bard in his dreams,
	The soul of his latest love-ditty.

Owen Meredith.    

	I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs,
	A palace and a prison on each hand;
	I saw from out the wave her structure rise,
	As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:
	A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
	Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
	O’er the far times, when many a subject land
	Look’d to the winged Lion’s marble piles,
	Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.

Byron.