While, on each side, each well-known building lost
Its separate beauty in one dark long curve.
RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES.
The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL
The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that there never was any such city.... The Church of St. Mark, standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pillars, is not in the least grey with time—no greyer than a Greek lyric.
‘All has suffered a sea-change
Into something rich and strange,’
in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its baptism in the sea....