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51
VENICE.
Time is the greatest of painters; he adds to the fabrics of geniusThat which no genius on earth ever has learned to impart.
Tints on his palette are spread, which the artist will never discover;
All that is harsh he subdues, making harmonious the whole.
Slowly he works, and unseen; and, alas! as he painteth he weakens;
Beauty he gives with his right, strength he removes with his left.
This is the price of his work; but art, though it be of the highest,
If at perfection it aims, needeth his finishing touch.
Where has he worked as at Venice, this hoary old painter primeval?
Where, with more generous hand, lavished his beautiful tints?
Look at the stately canal, a witness of pageants forgotten,
Which, like a serpent immense, winds through the city of isles.
There do the palaces stand, whose names are familiar from story—
Names that might long be deceased, had not the poet been there.
Proud in their cruel desertion, they ask not the stranger's compassion,
Yet, as he glides through their midst, who would refuse them a sigh?
There are they ranged on the shore, in their beautiful drapery timestained,
Sadly, to all who will list, telling a tale of their youth;
Poor decrepit remains, that mournfully gaze on the waters,
Which, like a mirror of truth, shows them how old they have grown.
There in the silent canal, the splash of the oar hath its sadness;
He that hath heard it and sighed, knows what an elegy means.
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Where, in the days of the past, thou didst thy Doges enthrone;
Where, in the great inner court, the sinister tablets of marble
Tell us the name of the wretch, there to the waters condemned;
Where, in the eloquent gloom, the air is with mystery laden,
All that is dead rising up; ay, and the square of St Mark,
Where the basilica stands, with its many round cupolas zinc-clad,
Calling the thoughts to the East, back to the Byzantine days;
Where, to a measureless height, the massive quadrangular belfry
Rises, alone and sublime, into the blue of the sky;
Where, from the ledges around, the cloud of slate-coloured pigeons,
Daily, obedient to man, rustling, alight to be fed.
Ay, and the alleys from isle unto isle, and the numberless bridges,
Where, as you pass on your way, gondolas shoot underneath.
Who can those bridges forget, or the miniature square in each islet,
Where a well, fashioned of bronze, quaintly the centre adorns?
Hard would it be to decide, in this noiseless city of islets,
Which has more charm for the mind, whether the land or the deep.
Blue is the sea in the open, green in the narrower waters,
Green and with streakings of brown under the high palace walls.
Here in the narrow canals, in the shadow of bridge and of buttress,
All that Romance has conceived presses confused on the mind.
Time has returned on his steps, and we stand in a century by-gone;
All that surrounds us is great; Venice is Venice again.
Swiftly the gondola glides in the shade and the favouring twilight,
Rearing its rostrum of steel, curved like the neck of a swan.
Masked by its colour funereal, silent it speeds and mysterious,
Saving the sound of the oar striking in cadence the wave.
Holding concealed in its bosom a soul that unnoted is noting.
Is it an errand of crime? Is it an errand of love?
Venice, the star of the sea, has satellites many and radiant
Set in the placid lagoon, blue as the vault of the sky,
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Rearing their towers aloft, proud of belonging to her.
Grand are these towers by day, but grander by night we beheld them,
Once when o'er city and isles hurried the Spirit of Storm.
Dost thou remember it still? How we stood at the wide-open window,
Into the dark looking out, hearing a drop or two fall?
Then how at intervals rapid the isle of St George, by the lightning
Stricken from out of the night, quivering came into view,
Tinged by a roseate light, and its convent and belfry stupendous
Printed one instant the sky, vivid, more vivid than day?
Dost thou remember it still, and the ships in the harbour at anchor?
Few in number, alas! silent are now the lagoons—
Emptiness here, but not ruin. Venice still stands in her glory,
Such as she stood in her day when she was Queen of the seas,
Seeming, as years pass away, to utter a piteous entreaty:
Greatness, Prosperity, come! all as ye left it remains;
Empty but splendid is all: the shell of a greatness departed;
Sad is the splendour intact, sadder than many a ruin.
Gone is the soul of the place; but the body in beauty endureth,
Fair as the eye can behold, more so perhaps than in life.
Death has a beauty at times, that entrances the poet and painter:
Pale though she be and inert, Venice in death hath a smile;
Lying in state as it were, with her crown of towers eternal,
Stretched on a mantle of blue, draped in her marbles of yore.
No, she was never more fair, since the day that she rose from the waters,
Formed, like the Goddess of Love, out of the foam of the sea.
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