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| WALK in St. Mark’s, the time the ample space | |
| Lies in the freshness of the evening shade, | |
| When, on each side, with gravely darkened face, | |
| The masses rise above the light arcade; | |
| Walk down the midst with slowly tunèd pace, | 5 |
| But gay withal,—for there is high parade | |
| Of fair attire and fairer forms, which pass | |
| Like varying groups on a magician’s glass. | |
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| From broad-illumined chambers far within, | |
| Or under curtains daintily outspread, | 10 |
| Music and laugh and talk, the motley din | |
| Of all who from sad thought or toil are sped, | |
| Here a chance hour of social joy to win, | |
| Gush forth,—but I love best, above my head | |
| To feel nor arch nor tent, nor anything | 15 |
| But that pure Heaven’s eternal covering. | |
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| It is one broad saloon, one gorgeous hall; | |
| A chamber, where a multitude, all kings, | |
| May hold full audience, splendid festival, | |
| Or Piety’s most pompous ministerings; | 20 |
| Thus be its height unmarred,—thus be it all | |
| One mighty room, whose form direct upsprings | |
| To the o’erarching sky;—it is right good, | |
| When Art and Nature keep such brotherhood. | |
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| For where, upon the firmest sodden land, | 25 |
| Has ever monarch’s power and toil of slaves | |
| Equalled the works of that self-governed band, | |
| Who fixed the Delos of the Adrian waves; | |
| Planting upon these strips of yielding sand | |
| A Temple of the Beautiful, which braves | 30 |
| The jealous strokes of ocean, nor yet fears | |
| The far more perilous sea, “whose waves are years”? | |
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| Walk in St. Mark’s again, some few hours after, | |
| When a bright sleep is on each storied pile,— | |
| When fitful music and inconstant laughter | 35 |
| Give place to Nature’s silent moonlight smile: | |
| Now Fancy wants no faery gale to waft her | |
| To Magian haunt or charm-engirded isle, | |
| All too content, in passive bliss, to see | |
| This show divine of visible poetry. | 40 |
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| On such a night as this impassionedly | |
| The old Venetian sung those verses rare, | |
| “That Venice must of needs eternal be, | |
| For Heaven had looked through the pellucid air, | |
| And cast its reflex in the crystal sea, | 45 |
| And Venice was the image pictured there.” | |
| I hear them now, and tremble, for I seem | |
| As treading on an unsubstantial dream. | |
| |
| Who talks of vanished glory, of dead power, | |
| Of things that were, and are not? Is he here? | 50 |
| Can he take in the glory of this hour, | |
| And call it all the decking of a bier? | |
| No, surely as on that Titanic tower | |
| The Guardian Angel stands in æther clear, | |
| With the moon’s silver tempering his gold wing, | 55 |
| So Venice lives, as lives no other thing:— | |
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| That strange Cathedral! exquisitely strange,— | |
| That front, on whose bright varied tints the eye | |
| Rests as of gems,—those arches, whose high range | |
| Gives its rich-broidered border to the sky,— | 60 |
| Those ever-prancing steeds!—My friend, whom change | |
| Of restless will has led to lands that lie | |
| Deep in the East, does not thy fancy set | |
| Above those domes an airy minaret? | |
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| Dost thou not feel that in this scene are blent | 65 |
| Wide distances of the estrangéd earth, | |
| Far thoughts, far faiths, beseeming her who bent | |
| The spacious Orient to her simple worth, | |
| Who, in her own young freedom eminent, | |
| Scorning the slaves that shamed their ancient birth, | 70 |
| And feeling what the West could be, had been, | |
| Went out a traveller, and returned a queen? | |
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