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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.

Venice

Venice

By John Edmund Reade (1800–1870)

(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

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!

Yea, there she sleeps, while on the waters lying

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

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.

Enter as in the vision of a dream,

Where all is strange, grotesque, mysterious, wild,

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

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,

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

With a strange sense of awe, of marvel, yet delight.

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,

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.