SCRAPS FROM THE DIARY OF A TRAVELLER.
BY THOMAS MOORE, ESQ.
O poets, poets, dream at home,
If you would still have visions haunt you;
Trust me, if once abroad you roam,
That mar-all, Truth, will disenchant you.
Still think of VENICE, as in dreams
You've seen her, by her ocean-streams;—
Fancy the calm and cool delights
Of gondolas on summer nights:
Of sailing o'er the bright Lagoon,
And listening, as you glide along,
To lays from TASSO, by that moon
Whose beams, alas! he felt too strong,
And of whose mad'ning philters all,
Who feel the Muse's genuine call,
Are doom'd, at times, to drink as deep,
As did Endymion in his sleep!
Still by your fire-sides sit, and think
Of palaces, along the brink
Of ocean-floods,—whose shadows there
Look like the ruins, grand and fair,
Of some lost ATALANTIS, seen
Beneath the wave, when heaven's serene.
People those palaces with forms
Lovely as TITIAN ever drew—
Bright creatures, whom the sunbeam warms
With that ethereal gas, all through.
Which finds a vent at lips and eyes,
And lights up in a lover's sighs.
Fancy these young Venetian maids
Listening, at night, to serenades
From amorous lutes, where Music, such
As southern skies alone afford,
Echoes to every burning touch,
And thrills in each impassion'd chord.
All this imagine, and still more,—
For whither may not Fancy soar,
If Truth do not, alas! too soon,
Puncture her brilliant air-balloon—
But go not to the spot, I pray;
O do not, do not, some fine day.
Order, like STERNE, your travelling breeches;—
All's lost, if once upon your way,
The passport of Lord ——
Is death to Fancy—like his speeches.
If you would save some dreams of youth
From the torpedo touch of Truth,
Go not to VENICE—do not blight
Your early fancies with the sight
Of her true, real, dismal state—
Her mansions, foul and desolate,—
Her close canals, exhaling wide
Such fetid airs as—with those domes
Of silent grandeur, by their side,
Where step of life ne'er goes or comes,
And those black barges plying round
With melancholy, plashing sound,—
Seem like a city, where the Pest
Is holding her last visitation,
And all, ere long, will be at rest,
The dead, sure rest of desolation.
So look'd, at night-fall, oft to me
That ruin'd City of the Sea;
And, as the gloomy fancy grew
Still darker with night's darkening hue,
All round me seem'd by Death o'ercast,—
Each footstep in those halls the last;
And the dim boats, as slow they pass'd,
All burial-barks, with each its load
Of livid corpses, feebly row'd
By fading hands, to find a bed
In waters less choked up with dead.—Metropolitan.