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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Venice

  • Venice once was dear,
  • The pleasant place of all festivity,
  • The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.
  • Byron.

  • In Venice, Tasso’s echoes are no more,
  • And silent rows the songless gondolier;
  • Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
  • And music meets not always now the ear.
  • Byron.

  • White swan of cities, slumbering in thy nest
  • So wonderfully built among the reeds
  • Of the lagoon, that fences thee and feeds,
  • As sayeth thy old historian and thy guest!
  • Longfellow.

  • I loved her from my boyhood; she to me
  • Was as a fairy city of the heart,
  • Rising like water-columns from the sea,
  • Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart;
  • And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare’s art,
  • Had stamp’d her image in me.
  • Byron.

  • The sylphs and ondines
  • And the sea-kings and queens
  • Long ago, long ago, on the waves built a city,
  • As lovely as seems
  • To some bard in his dreams,
  • The soul of his latest love-ditty.
  • Owen Meredith.

  • I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs,
  • A palace and a prison on each hand;
  • I saw from out the wave her structure rise,
  • As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:
  • A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
  • Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
  • O’er the far times, when many a subject land
  • Look’d to the winged Lion’s marble piles,
  • Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.
  • Byron.