The music they heard before now passed Montoni’s barge in one of the gondolas, of which several were seen skimming along the moonlight sea, full of gay parties, catching the cool breeze. Most of these had music, made sweeter by the waves over which it floated, and by the measured sound of oars as they dashed the sparkling tide.... The barge passed on to the Grand Canal, where Montoni’s mansion was situated. And here other forms of beauty and of grandeur, such as her imagination had never painted, were unfolded to Emily in the palaces of Sansovino and Palladio, as she glided along the waves. The air bore no sounds but those of sweetness, echoing along each margin of the canal, and from gondolas on its surface, while groups of masks were seen dancing on the moonlight terraces, and seemed almost to realize the romance of fairyland.... The singers sung in parts, the verses of Ariosto. They sung of the wars of the Moors against Charlemagne, and then of the woes of Orlando: afterwards the measure changed, and the melancholy sweetness of Petrarch succeeded. The magic of his grief was assisted by all that Italian expression, heightened by the enchantments of Venetian moonlight, could give.
MRS. RADCLIFFE.
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,