“This is the loggia Browning loved,
High on the flank of the friendly town;
These are the hills that his keen eye roved,
The green like a cataract leaping down
To the plain that his pen gave new renown.
“There to the West what a range of blue!—
The very background Titian drew
To his peerless Loves. O tranquil scene!
Who than thy poet fondlier knew
The peaks and the shore and the lore between?
“See! yonder’s his Venice—the valiant Spire,
Highest one of the perfect three,
Guarding the others: the Palace choir,
The Temple flashing with opal fire—
Bubble and foam of the sunlit sea.”
Edgar Fawcett, always enchanted with his Venetian days, pictures the northern lagoon, some six miles from Venice, as “a revel of pastoral greenness, with briery hedges, numberless wild flowers and the most captivating of sinuous creeks, overarched by an occasional bridge, so old that you greet with respect every moss-grown inch of its drowsy and sagging brickwork. The cathedral, the ineludible cathedral of all Italian settlements, is reached after a short ramble, and you enter it with mingled awe and amusement,” he continues. “Some of its mosaics, representing martyrs being devoured by flames and evidently enjoying themselves a great deal during this mortuary process, challenge the disrespectful smile. But others are vested with a rude yet sacred poetry, and certain semi-Oriental marble sculptures, adjacent to the altar, would make an infidel feel like crossing himself for the crime of having yielded to a humorous twinge. This duomo dates far back beyond the Middle Ages, and so does the small Church of Santa Fosca, only a step away. What renders Torcello so individual among all the islands and islets of the lagoon, I should say, is her continual contrast between the ever-recurrent idyllicism of open meadows or wilding clusters of simple rustic thickets, and the enormous antiquity of these two hoary ecclesiastic fanes. History is in the air, and you feel that the very daisies you crush underfoot, the very copses from which you pluck a scented spray, have their delicate rustic ancestries, dating back to Attila, who is said once to have brought his destructive presence where now such sweet solemnity of desertion and quietude unmolestedly rules.”
History and legend and art and romance meet and mingle to create that indefinable sorcery of Venice. It is like nothing on earth except a poet’s dream, and his poetic dream is of the ethereal realm. The wonderful music that floats over the “silver trail” of still waters; the mystic silences; the resplendence of color,—all, indeed, weave themselves into an incantation of the gods; it is the ineffable loveliness of Paradise where the rose of morning glows “and the June is always June,” and it is no more earth, but a celestial atmosphere,—this glory of June in Venice.
Dear Italy! The sound of thy soft name
Soothes me with balm of Memory and Hope.
Mine, for the moment, height and sweep and slope
That once were mine. Supreme is still the aim
To flee the cold and gray
Of our December day,
And rest where thy clear spirit burns with unconsuming flame.
Thou human-hearted land, whose revels hold
Man in communion with the antique days,
And summon him from prosy greed to ways
Where Youth is beckoning to the Age of Gold;
How thou dost hold him near
And whisper in his ear
Of the lost Paradise that lies beyond the alluring haze!