Couvre son front qui passe
D’un nuage étoilé
Demi-voilé.
Ainsi, la dame abbesse
De Sainte-Croix rabaisse
Sa cape aux vastes plis
Sur son surplis,
Et les palais antiques,
Et les graves portiques,
Et les blancs escaliers
Des chevaliers,
Et les ponts, et les rues,
Et les mornes statues,
Et le golfe mouvant
Qui tremble au vent,
Tout se tait, fors les gardes
Aux longues hallebardes,
Qui veillent aux créneaux
Des arsenaux.
--Ah! maintenant plus d’une
Attend, au clair de lune,
Quelque jeune muguet,
L’oreille au guet.
Pour le bal qu’ou prépare,
Plus d’une qui se pare,
Met devant son miroir
Le masque noir....
Et qui, dans l’Italie,
N’a son grain de folie?
Qui ne garde aux amours
Ses plus beaux jours?
Laissons la vieille horloge,
Au palais du vieux doge,
Lui compter de ses nuits
Les longs ennuis.
Comptons plutôt, ma belle,
Sur ta bouche rebelle,
Tant de baisers donnés.
Ou pardonnés.
Comptons plutôt tes charmes,
Comptons les douces larmes
Qu’à nos yeux a coûtè
La volupté!
ALFRED DE MUSSET.
A PEERLESS CITY
Safe at Venice. A place whose strange and passing beauty is well known
to thee by report of our mariners. Dost mind too how Peter would
oft fill our ears withal, we handed beneath the table, and he still
discoursing of this sea-enthroned and peerless city, in shape a bow,
and its great canal and palaces on piles, and its watery ways plied by
scores of gilded boats; and that market-place of nations, orbis, non
urbis, forum, St. Mark his place? And his statue with the peerless
jewels in his eyes, and the lion at his gate? But I, lying at my window
in pain, may see none of these beauties as yet, but only a street,
fairly paved, which is dull, and houses with oiled paper and linen,
in lieu of glass, which is rude; and the passers-by, their habits and
their gestures, wherein they are superfluous. Therefore, not to miss my
daily comfort of whispering to thee, I will e’en turn mine eyes inward,
and bind my sheaves of wisdom reaped by travel. For I love thee so,
that no treasure pleases me not shared with thee; and what treasure
so good and enduring as knowledge? This then have I, Sir Footsore,
learned, that each nation hath its proper wisdom, and its proper folly;
and methinks, could a great king, or duke, tramp like me, and see
with his own eyes, he might pick the flowers, and eschew the weeds of
nations, and go home and set his own folk on Wisdom’s hill....
The Italians are a polished and subtle people. They judge a man, not
by his habits, but his speech and gesture. Here Sir Chough may by no
means pass for falcon gentle, as did I in Germany, pranked in my noble
servant’s feathers. Wisest of all nations in their singular temperance
of food and drink. Most foolish of all to search strangers coming into
their borders, and stay them from bringing much money in. They should
rather invite it, and like other nations, let the traveller from taking
of it out. Also here in Venice the dames turn their black hair yellow
by the sun and art, to be wiser than Him who made them. Ye enter no
Italian town without a bill of health, though now is no plague in
Europe. This peevishness is for extortion’s sake. The innkeepers cringe
and fawn, and cheat, and in country places, murder you. Yet will they
give you clean sheets by paying therefor. Delicate in eating, and abhor
from putting their hand in the plate; sooner they will apply a crust
or what not. They do even tell of a cardinal at Rome, which armeth his
guest’s left hand with a little bifurcal dagger to hold the meat, while
his knife cutteth it. But methinks this, too, is to be wiser than Him,
who made the hand so supple and prehensile....
Their bread is lovely white. Their meats they spoil with sprinkling
cheese over them; O, perversity! Their salt is black; without a lie. In
commerce these Venetians are masters of the earth and sea; and govern
their territories wisely.... Also, in religion, they hang their cloth
according to the wind, siding now with the Pope, now with the Turk; but
aye with the god of traders, mammon hight. Shall flower so cankered
bloom to the world’s end? But since I speak of flowers, this none may
deny them, that they are most cunning in making roses and gilliflowers
to blow unseasonably. In summer they nip certain of the budding roses
and water them not. Then in winter they dig round these discouraged
plants, and put in cloves; and so with great art rear sweet-scented
roses, and bring them to market in January....
Sweetheart, I must be brief, and tell thee but a part of that I have
seen, for this day my journal ends. To-night it sails for thee, and I,
unhappy, not with it, but to-morrow, in another ship, to Rome.
Dear Margaret, I took a hand litter, and was carried to St. Mark his
church. Outside it, towards the market-place, is a noble gallery, and
above it four famous horses, cut in brass by the ancient Romans, and
seem all moving, and at the very next step must needs leap down on the
beholder. About the church are six hundred pillars of marble, porphyry,
and ophites. Inside is a treasure greater than either at St. Denys, or
Loretto, or Toledo. Here a jewelled pitcher given the seigniory by a
Persian king, also the ducal cap blazing with jewels, and on its crown
a diamond and a chrysolite, each as big as an almond; two golden crowns
and twelve golden stomachers studded with jewels, from Constantinople;
item, a monstrous sapphire; item, a great diamond given by a French
king; item, a prodigious carbuncle; item, three unicorns’ horns. But
what are these compared with the sacred relics?
Dear Margaret, I stood and saw the brazen chest that holds the body of
St. Mark the Evangelist. I saw with these eyes and handled his ring,
and his gospel written with his own hand, and all my travels seemed
light; for who am I that I should see such things? Dear Margaret, his
sacred body was first brought from Alexandria by merchants in 810, and
then not prized as now; for between 829, when this church was builded,
and 1094, the very place where it lay was forgotten. Then holy priests
fasted and prayed many days seeking for light, and lo! the Evangelist’s
body brake at midnight through the marble and stood before them. They
fell to the earth; but in the morning found the crevice the sacred body
had burst through, and peering through it saw him lie. Then they took
and laid him in his chest beneath the altar, and carefully put back
the stone with its miraculous crevice, which crevice I saw, and shall
gape for a monument while the world lasts. After that they showed me
the Virgin’s chair, it is of stone; also her picture, painted by St.
Luke, very dark, and the features now scarce visible. This picture, in
time of drought, they carry in procession, and brings the rain. I wish
I had not seen it. Item, two pieces of marble spotted with John the
Baptist’s blood; item, a piece of the true cross, and of the pillar to
which Christ was tied; item, the rock struck by Moses, and wet to this
hour; also a stone Christ sat on, preaching at Tyre; but some say it
is the one the patriarch Jacob laid his head on, and I hold with them,
by reason our Lord never preached at Tyre. Going hence, they showed me
the state nursery for the children of those aphrodisian dames, their
favourites. Here in the outer wall was a broad niche, and if they bring
them so little as they can squeeze them through it alive, the bairn
falls into a net inside, and the state takes charge of it, but if too
big, their mothers must even take them home again, with whom abiding
’tis like to be mali corvi mali ovum. Coming out of the church we met
them carrying in a corpse, with the feet and face bare. This I then
first learned is Venetian custom, and sure no other town will ever rob
them of it.... But what I most admired was to see over against the
Duke’s palace a fair gallows in alabaster, reared express to bring him,
and no other, for the least treason to the state; and there it stands
in his eye whispering him memento mori. I pondered, and owned these
signors my masters, who will let no man, not even their sovereign, be
above the common weal.
CHARLES READE.
‘VENICE, WHOSE NAME DID ONCE ADORN THE WORLD’
Venice, whose name did once adorn the world,
Thou mightst have been all that thou ever wert,
In form and feature and material strength,
Up from the sea, which is thy pedestal,
Unto thy Campanile’s golden top,
And yet have never won the precious crown,
To be the loved of human hearts, to be
The wise man’s treasure now and evermore.
The ingenious boldness, the creative will,
Which from some weak uncertain plots of sand,
Cast up among the waters, could erect
Foundations firm as on the central ground;
The art which changed thy huts to palaces,
And bade the God of Ocean’s temples rise
Conspicuous far above the crystal plain,
The ever-active nerve of industry,
That bound the Orient to the Occident
In fruitful commerce, till thy lap was filled
With wealth, the while thy head was girt with power,
Each have their separate palm from wondering men ...
Prime model of a Christian commonwealth!
Thou wise simplicity, which present men
Calumniate, not conceiving; joy is mine,
That I have read and learnt thee as I ought,
Not in the crude compiler’s painted shell,
But in thine own memorials of live stone,
And in the pictures of thy kneeling princes,
And in the lofty words on lofty tombs,
And in the breath of ancient chroniclers,
And in the music of the outer sea.
RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES.
THE BRIDE OF THE SEA
There are cities high over Orion
That jasper and sardonyx be;
Whose streets it were joy but to lie on,
Whose walls it were bliss but to see;
Many sumptuous cities fair Dian
Beholds over mountain and lea,
But the Bride, ’neath the wings of her Lion,--
Where is one such as she?
She is crowned with her triumphs and towers,
And blue run the veins in her arms;
Like the lotus, afloat with her flowers,
Her whiteness hath wonderous charms;
Delicious her lips are, with powers
Circean, yet void of alarms;
And the mortal that dreams of her bowers
Leaves his soul in her arms.
Yet should time, ever eager, though olden,
Her fairness despoil and depose;
Should her domes, which at evening are golden,
Dissolve as her Apennine snows;
Should the sceptre, which long she hath holden,
Depart, and the crown from her brows,
And the robes of her splendour be rolled in
The gray dust of her woes;
Should the glory grow dim of her Titians,
Her gondolas drift ’neath the moon;
Should her marbles, mosaics, Venetians,
Evanish and pass as a swoon;
Should her forehead, the fairest of visions,
Sink under the silent lagoon,
And the sea, tombing all her traditions,
Leave a waste for the loon;
Should she melt as a mist evanescent,
Or fade as a myth from a scroll,--
Yet her wraith would arise juvenescent,
Aglow with a great aureole;
Still her glamour eternally crescent,
Supreme o’er the spirit would roll;
And her Name, as a star iridescent,
Light the sky of the soul.
Though in regions celestial there are lands--
Bright lands it were bliss but to see,
Whose towers, built high over star lands,
Of beryl and sardonyx be:
Though cities in fabulous far lands
Loom fair over mountain and lea,--
Yet on earth, in her gloom, or her garlands,
Who so comely as she!
LLOYD MIFFLIN.
BROWNING’S VENICE
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.
ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON.
VENICE
If you would see Venice as she is,
Wander by night in silence and alone
Among her towers and sculptured palaces
And read the story she has writ in stone;
Then, as you read, she will upon you cast
The fascination of her wondrous past.
Muse on, and let the silent gondolier
Wind at his will ’mid tortuous, twisting ways
And broad lagoons, with waters wide and clear,
On whose unruffled breast the moonbeam plays;
And move not, speak not, for the mystery
Of Venice is with you on the sea.
Pass, if you will, beneath the five great domes
Of old Saint Mark’s; watch how the glittering height
Soars in quick curves; see how each sunbeam roams
And fills the nave with soft pure amber light;
This is the heart of Venice, and the tomb
Which folds her story in its sacred gloom.
So leave her sunlight, enter now her cells,
By frowning black-browed ports and massy bars,
Where pestilence in foul dank vapour dwells,
Far, far from sun and day, from moon and stars
The only sound when whispering waters glide
In on the bosom of a sluggish tide.
Then turn again into her solitudes,--
Things of to-day will faint and fade like smoke;--
Drift through the darkened nooks where silence broods,
Let memory fall upon you like a cloak:
Venice will rise around you as of old.
Decked out in marble, amethyst, and gold.
But that was years ago; to-day the notes
Of wild free song have left her silver streets;
Her blazoned banner now no longer floats
In aureate folds, no more the sunrise greets;
She lives but in a past so strong and brave
It serves alike for monument and grave.
ALAN SULLIVAN.
GEORGE ELIOT’S IMPRESSION OF VENICE
From Padua to Venice! It was about ten o’clock on a moonlight
night--the 4th of June--that we found ourselves apparently on a railway
in the midst of the sea: we were on the bridge across the lagoon. Soon
we were in a gondola on the Grand Canal, looking out at the moonlit
buildings and water. What stillness! What beauty! Looking out from the
high window of our hotel on the Grand Canal, I felt that it was a pity
to go to bed. Venice was more beautiful than romances had feigned.
And that was the impression that remained, and even deepened, during
our stay of eight days. That quiet which seems the deeper because one
hears the delicious dip of the oar (when not disturbed by clamorous
church bells), leaves the eye in full liberty and strength to take in
the exhaustless loveliness of colour and form.
We were in our gondola by nine o’clock the next morning, and of course
the first point we sought was the Piazza di San Marco. I am glad to
find Ruskin calling the Palace of the Doges one of the two most perfect
buildings in the world.... This spot is a focus of architectural
wonders: but the palace is the crown of them all. The double tier of
columns and arches, with the rich sombreness of their finely outlined
shadows, contrast satisfactorily with the warmth and light and more
continuous surface of the upper part. Even landing on the Piazzetta,
one has a sense, not only of being in an entirely novel scene, but one
where the ideas of a foreign race have poured themselves in without
yet mingling indistinguishably with the pre-existent Italian life. But
this is felt yet more strongly when one has passed along the Piazzetta
and arrived in front of San Marco, with its low arches and domes and
minarets. But perhaps the most striking point to take one’s stand on
is just in front of the white marble guard-house flanking the great
tower--the guard-house with Sansovino’s iron gates before it. On the
left is San Marco, with the two square pillars from St. Jean d’Acre,
standing as isolated trophies; on the right the Piazzetta extends
between the Doge’s palace and the Palazzo Reale to the tall columns
from Constantinople; and in front is the elaborate gateway leading to
the white marble Scala dei Giganti, in the courtyard of the Doge’s
palace. Passing through this gateway and up the staircase, we entered
the gallery which surrounds the court on three sides, and looked down
at the fine sculptured vase-like wells below. Then into the great Sala,
surrounded with the portraits of the Doges: the largest oil-painting
here--or perhaps anywhere else--is the ‘Gloria del Paradiso’ by
Tintoretto, now dark and unlovely. But on the ceiling is a great Paul
Veronese--the ‘Apotheosis of Venice’--which looks as fresh as if it
were painted yesterday, and is a miracle of colour and composition--a
picture full of glory and joy of an earthly, fleshly kind, but without
any touch of coarseness or vulgarity. Below the radiant Venice on
her clouds is a balcony filled with upward-looking spectators; and
below this gallery is a group of human figures with horses. Next to
this Apotheosis, I admire another Coronation of Venice on the ceiling
of another Sala, where Venice is sitting enthroned above the globe
with her lovely face in half-shadow--a creature born with an imperial
attitude. There are other Tintorettos, Veroneses, and Palmas in the
great halls of this palace; but they left me quite indifferent, and
have become vague in my memory. From the splendours of the palace we
crossed the Bridge of Sighs to the prisons, and saw the horrible dark
damp cells that would make the saddest life in the free light and air
seem bright and desirable.
The interior of St. Mark’s is full of interest, but not of beauty: it
is dark and heavy, and ill-suited to the Catholic worship, for the
massive piers that obstruct the view everywhere shut out the sight of
ceremony and procession, as we witnessed at our leisure on the day of
the great procession of Corpus Christi. But everywhere there are relics
of gone-by art to be studied, from mosaics of the Greeks to mosaics of
later artists than the Zuccati; old marble statues, embrowned like a
meerschaum pipe; amazing sculptures in wood; Sansovino doors, ambitious
to rival Ghiberti’s; transparent alabaster columns; an ancient Madonna,
hung with jewels, transported from St. Sophia, in Constantinople; and
everywhere the venerable pavement, once beautiful with its starry
patterns in rich marble, now deadened and sunk to unevenness like the
mud floor of a cabin.
Then outside, on the archway of the principal door, there are
sculptures of a variety that makes one renounce the study of them in
despair at the shortness of one’s time--blended fruits and foliage,
and human groups and animal forms of all kinds. On our first morning
we ascended the great tower, and looked around on the island-city and
the distant mountains and the distant Adriatic. And on the same day
we went to see the Pisani Palace--one of the grand old palaces that
are going to decay.... After this we saw the Church of San Sebastiano,
where Paul Veronese is buried, with his own paintings around, mingling
their colour with the light that falls on his tombstone. There is
one remarkably fine painting of his here: it represents, I think,
some Saints going to martyrdom, but apart from that explanation, is a
composition full of vigorous, spirited figures....
Santa Maria della Salute, built as an _ex voto_ by the Republic on the
cessation of the plague, is one of the most conspicuous churches in
Venice, lifting its white cupolas close on the Grand Canal, where it
widens out towards the Giudecca. Here there are various Tintorettos,
but the only one which is not blackened so as to be unintelligible
is the _Cena_, which is represented as a bustling supper-party, with
attendants and sideboard accessories, in thoroughly Dutch fashion!...
But of all Tintoretto’s paintings, the best preserved, and perhaps
the most complete in execution, is the Miracle of St. Mark at the
Accademia. We saw it the oftener because we were attracted to the
Accademia again and again by Titian’s Assumption, which we placed next
to Peter the Martyr among the pictures at Venice. For a thoroughly rapt
expression I never saw anything equal to the Virgin in this picture;
and the expression is the more remarkable because it is not assisted
by the usual devices to express spiritual ecstasy, such as delicacy
of feature and temperament or pale meagreness. Then what cherubs and
angelic heads bathed in light! The lower part of the picture has no
interest; the attitudes are theatrical; and the Almighty above is as
unbeseeming as painted Almighties usually are: but the middle group
falls short only of the Sistine Madonna.
Among the Venetian painters Giovanni Bellini shines with a mild,
serious light that gives one an affectionate respect towards him. In
the Church of the Scalzi there is an exquisite Madonna by him--probably
his _chef-d’œuvre_--comparable to Raphael’s for sweetness.
And Palma Vecchio, too, must be held in grateful reverence for his
Santa Barbara, standing in calm, grand beauty above an altar in the
Church of Santa Maria Formosa. It is an almost unique presentation of
a hero-woman, standing in calm preparation for martyrdom, without the
slightest air of pietism, yet with the expression of a mind filled with
serious conviction.
We made the journey to Chioggia.... Of all dreamy delights, that of
floating in a gondola along the canals and out on the lagoon is surely
the greatest. We were out one night on the lagoon when the sun was
setting, and the wide waters were flushed with the reddened light. I
should have liked it to last for hours: it is the sort of scene in
which I could most readily forget my own existence, and feel melted
into the general life.
Another charm of evening time was to walk up and down the Piazza of
San Marco as the stars were brightening and look at the grand dim
buildings, and the flock of pigeons flitting about them; or to walk on
to the Bridge of La Paglia and look along the dark canal that runs
under the Bridge of Sighs--its blackness lit up by a gaslight here and
there, and the plash of the oar of blackest gondola slowly advancing....
Farewell, lovely Venice! and away to Verona, across the green plains of
Lombardy, which can hardly look tempting to an eye still filled with
the dreamy beauty it has left behind.
_GEORGE ELIOT’S LIFE AS RELATED IN HER
LETTERS AND JOURNALS._
BEFORE ‘A SURVEY OF THE CITY OF VENICE’
THAT EXQUISITE LARGE PEECE
Could any state on earth immortal be,
_Venice_ by her rare Government is she....
Though, Syren-like, on shore and sea, her face
Enchants all those whom once she doth embrace.
Nor is there any can her beauty prize
But he who hath beheld her with his eyes....
_Venus_ and _Venice_ are, Great Queens in their degree;
_Venus_ is Queen of love, _Venice_ of policy.
JAMES HOWELL.
VENICE: THE GEM OF THE WORLD
AN EPITOME
Having now so amply declared unto you most of the principall things
of this thrise-renowned and illustrious citie, I will briefly by way
of epitome mention most of the other particulars thereof, and so
finally shut up this narration: There are reported to be in Venice
and the circumjacent islands two hundred Churches in which are one
hundred forty three paire organs, fifty foure Monasteries, twenty sixe
Nunneries, fifty sixe Tribunals or places of judgment, seventeene
Hospitals, sixe Companies or Fraternities; one hundred sixty five
marble statues of worthy personages, partly equestriall, partly
pedestriall, which are erected in sundry places of the citie, to the
honour of those that eyther at home have prudently administered the
Commonweale, or abroad valiantly fought for the same. Likewise of brass
there are twenty three, whereof one is that of Bartholomew Coleon.
Also there are twentie seven publique clocks, ten brasen gates, a
hundred and fourteene Towers for bels to hang in, ten brasen horses,
one hundred fifty wels for the common use of the citizens, one hundred
eighty five delectable gardens, ten thousand Gondolaes, foure hundred
and fifty bridges partly stony, partly timber, one hundred and twenty
Palaces, whereof one hundred are very worthy of that name, one hundred
seventy foure courts: and the totall number of soules living in the
citie and about the same is thought to be about five hundred thousand,
something more or lesse. For sometimes there is a catalogue made of all
the persons in the citie of what sexe or age soever they be; as we may
reade there was heretofore in Rome in the time of Augustus Cæsar: and
at the last view there were found in the whole city as many as I have
before spoken.