AT THE DOGANA

NIGHT, and the silence of the night,
In Venice; far away, a song;

As if the lyric water made

Itself a serenade;

As if the water's silence were a song

Sent up into the night.

Night, a more perfect day,

A day of shadows luminous,

Water and sky at one, at one with us;
As if the very peace of night,

The older peace than heaven or light,
Came down into the day.

ARTHUR SYMONS.

ON THE LIDO

On her still lake the city sits

While bark and boat beside her flits,

Nor hears, her soft siesta taking,

The Adriatic billows breaking.

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.

LIDO

I RODE one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this, an uninhabited sea-side,

Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks

The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes

A narrow space of level sand thereon,

Where 't was our wont to ride while day went down.

This ride was my delight. I love all waste

And solitary places, where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be;
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows: and yet more
Than all, with a remembered friend I love
To ride as then I rode;-for the winds drove
The living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening north;
And from the waves sound like delight broke forth

Harmonising with solitude, and sent
Into our hearts aerial merriment.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

THE JEWS' CEMETERY

LIDO OF VENICE

A TRACT of land swept by the salt sea-foam,
Fringed with acacia flowers, and billowy deep
In meadow-grasses, where tall poppies sleep,
And bees athirst for wilding honey roam.
How many a bleeding heart hath found its home
Under these hillocks which the sea-mews sweep!
Here knelt an outcast race to curse and weep,
Age after age, 'neath heaven's unanswering dome.

Sad is the place, and solemn. Grave by grave, Lost in the dunes, with rank weeds overgrown, Pines in abandonment; as though unknown, Uncared for, lay the dead, whose records pave

This path neglected; each forgotten stone Wept by no mourner but the moaning wave. JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

TORCELLO

TORCELLO

SHORT Sail from Venice sad Torcello lies,
Deserted island, low and still and green.
Before fair Venice was a bride and queen
Torcello's court was held in fairer guise
Than Doges knew. To-day death-vapours rise
From fields where once her palaces were seen,
And in her silent towers that crumbling lean
Unterrified the brooding swallow flies.
O once-loved friend, who dost in vain implore
My presence, thou art like Torcello's land.
Thy wasted life to me seems life no more.
With all its beauty death goes hand in hand,
I shrink from thee, as on its blighted strand
Torcello's ghosts might turn and fly the shore.
HELEN HUNT.

ASOLO

BROWNING AT ASOLO

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.

Yesterday he was part of it all—

Sat here, discerning cloud from snow
In the flush of the Alpine afterglow,

Or mused on the vineyard whose wine-stirred

row

Meets in a leafy bacchanal.