THE SEA SPELL
‘Venice herself is poetry, and creates a poet out of the dullest clay.’ It was a poet who spoke, and his clay was instinct with the breath of genius. But it is true that Venice lends wings to duller clay; it has been her fate to make poets of many who were not so before—a responsibility that entails loss on her as well as gain. She has lived—she has loved and suffered and created; and the echoes of her creation are with us still; the pulse of the life which once she knew continues to throb behind the loud and insistent present.
BERYL DE SÉLINCOURT AND MAY STURGE HENDERSON.
... O! for the echo on Lido’s shore
Of the grey Adriatic’s sullen roar,
And the tender blue which sunset throws
On our Euganean hills,
While the Grand Canal is a path of rose,
And the watery mist with radiance fills,
And the mighty palaces loom pale
Like battlements in a fairy tale.
LADY LINDSAY.
The great Venetian heaven, overarching the lagoon, has especially this power to fascinate, to take one suddenly by surprise with an unlooked-for revelation of its beauty, its greatness, and its immortal activity; charging the spirit with some transport of the skies, and compelling it to its knees in adoration.
HORATIO F. BROWN.
Ah! you never yet
Were far away from Venice, never saw
Her beautiful towers in the receding distance,
While every furrow of the vessel’s track
Seem’d ploughing deep into your heart; you never
Saw day go down upon your native spires
So calmly with its gold and crimson glory,
And after dreaming a disturbed vision
Of them and theirs, awoke and found them not.
LORD BYRON.