Part 15

Brief, brief has been our meeting, And, as the sea grows grey, Amid the rose light fleeting We pass upon our way.

PERCY PINKERTON.

À LA ZUECCA

À Saint-Blaise, à la Zuecca, Vous étiez, vous étiez bien aise À Saint-Blaise. À Saint-Blaise, à la Zuecca, Nous étions bien là.

Mais de vous en souvenir Prendrez vous la peine? Mais de vous en souvenir Et d’y revenir,

À Saint-Blaise, à la Zuecca, Dans les prés fleuris cueillir la verveine; À Saint-Blaise, à la Zuecca, Vivre et mourir là.

ALFRED DE MUSSET.

LA MADONNA DELL’ACQUA

_In the centre of the lagoon between Venice and the mouths of the Brenta, supported on a few mouldering piles, stands a small shrine dedicated to the Madonna dell’Acqua, which the gondolier never passes without a prayer._

Around her shrine no earthly blossoms blow, No footsteps fret the pathway to and fro; No sign nor record of departed prayer, Print of the stone, nor echo of the air; Worn by the lip, nor wearied by the knee,-- Only a deeper silence of the sea: For there, in passing, pause the breezes bleak, And the foam fades, and all the waves are weak. The pulse-like oars in softer fall succeed, The black prow falters through the wild seaweed-- Where, twilight-borne, the minute thunders reach, Of deep-mouthed surf, that bays by Lido’s beach. With intermittent motion traversed far, And shattered glancing of the western star, Till the faint storm-bird on the heaving flow Drops in white circles, silently like snow. Not here the ponderous gem nor pealing note, Dim to adorn--insentient to adore-- But purple-dyed, the mists of evening float, In ceaseless incense from the burning floor Of ocean, and the gathered gold of heaven Laces its sapphire vault, and, early given The white rays of the rushing firmament Pierce the blue-quivering night through wreath or rent Of cloud inscrutable and motionless,-- Hectic and wan, and moon-companioned cloud! Oh! lone Madonna, angel of the deep, When the night falls, and deadly winds are loud, Will not thy love be with us while we keep Our watch upon the waters, and the gaze Of thy soft eyes, that slumber not, nor sleep? Deem not then, stranger, that such trust is vain; Faith walks not on these weary waves alone, Though weakness dread or apathy disdain The spot which God has hallowed for His own. They sin who pass it lightly, ill-divining The glory of this place of bitter prayer; And hoping against hope, and self-resigning, And reach of faith, and wrestling with despair, And resurrection of the last distress, Into the sense of Heaven, when earth is bare, And of God’s voice, when man’s is comfortless.

JOHN RUSKIN.

LORD BYRON ON THE LIDO

Lord Byron (writes the poet’s friend) proposed to me to accompany him in his rides on the Lido.... Every day that the weather would permit, Lord Byron called for me in his gondola, and we found the horses waiting for us outside the fort. We rode as far as we could along the sea-shore, and then on a kind of dyke, or embankment, which has been raised where the island was very narrow, as far as another small fort, about half-way between the principal one and the town or village of Malamocco, near the other extremity of the island,--the distance being about three miles.

On the land side of the embankment, near the smaller fort, was a boundary stone, which probably marked some division of property,--all the side of the island, nearest the lagoon, being divided into gardens for the cultivation of vegetables. At the foot of this stone, Lord Byron repeatedly told me that I should cause him to be interred, if he should die in Venice, or its neighbourhood. During my residence here ... nothing could be more delightful than these rides on the Lido. We were from half to three-quarters of an hour crossing the water, during which his conversation was most amusing and interesting. Sometimes he would bring with him any new book he had received, and read to me the passages which struck him most. Often he would repeat to me whole stanzas of the poems he was writing, as he had composed them on the preceding evening.

THOMAS MOORE.

THE LIDO AND ITS GRAVES

I went to greet the full May-moon On that long narrow shoal Which lies between the still lagoon And the open ocean’s roll.

How pleasant was that grassy shore, When one for months had been Shut up in streets,--to feel once more One’s footfall on the green!

There are thick trees too in that place; But straight from sea to sea, Over a rough uncultured space, The path goes drearily.

I pass along with many a bound To hail the fresh free wave; But, pausing, wonderingly found I was treading on a grave.

Then, at one careless look, I saw That, for some distance round, Tombstones, without design or law, Were scattered on the ground:

Of pirates or of mariners I deemed that these might be The fitly-chosen sepulchres, Encircled by the sea.

But there are words inscribed on all, In the tongue of a far land, And marks of things symbolical, I could not understand.

They are the graves of that sad race, Who, from their Syrian home, For ages, without resting-place, Are doomed in woe to roam;

Who, in the days of sternest faith, Glutted the sword and flame, As if a taint of moral death Were in their very name:

And even under laws most mild, All shame was deemed their due, And the nurse told the Christian child To shun the cursèd Jew.

Thus all their gold’s insidious grace Availed not here to gain, For their last sleep, a seemlier place Than this bleak-featured plain.

Apart, severely separate. On the verge of the outer sea, Their home of death is desolate As their life’s home could be.

The common sand-path had defaced And prest down many a stone; Others can be but faintly traced In the rank grass o’er them grown.

I thought of Shylock,--the fierce heart Whose wrongs and injuries old Temper, in Shakespeare’s world of art, His lusts of blood and gold;

Perchance that form of broken pride Here at my feet once lay,-- But lay alone,--for at his side There was no Jessica!

Fondly I love each island-shore, Embraced by Adrian waves; But none has memory cherished more Than Lido and its graves.

RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES.

AN ISLAND VISIT

I am just returned from visiting the isles of Murano, Torcello, and Mazorbo, distant about five miles from Venice. To these amphibious spots the Romans, inhabitants of eastern Lombardy, fled from the rapine of Attila; and, if we may believe Cassiodorus, there was a time when they presented a beautiful appearance. Beyond them, on the coast of the lagoons, rose the once populous city of Altina, with its six stately gates, which Dandolo mentions. Its neighbourhood was scattered with innumerable villas and temples, composing altogether a prospect which Martial compares to Baiæ: ‘Æmula Baiunis Altini littora villis.’

But this agreeable scene, like so many others, is passed entirely away, and has left nothing, except heaps of stones and misshapen fragments, to vouch for its former magnificence. Two of the islands, Costanziaco and Amiano, that are imagined to have contained the bowers and gardens of the Altinatians, have sunk beneath the waters; those which remain are scarcely worthy to rise above their surface.

Though I was persuaded little was left to be seen above ground, I could not deny myself the imaginary pleasure of treading a corner of the earth once so adorned and cultivated; and of walking over the roofs, perhaps, of concealed halls and undiscovered palaces. Hiring, therefore, a _peiotte_, we took some provisions and music (to us equally necessaries of life), and launched into the canal, between St. Michael and Murano.

The waves coursed each other with violence, and dark clouds hung over the grand sweep of northern mountains, whilst the west smiled with azure and bright sunshine. Thunder rolled awfully at a distance, and those white and greyish birds, the harbingers of storms, flitted frequently before our bark. For some moments we were in doubt whether to proceed; but as we advanced by a little dome in the Isle of St. Michael, shaped like an ancient temple, the sky cleared, and the ocean subsiding by degrees, soon presented a tranquil expanse, across which we were smoothly wafted. Our instruments played several delightful airs, that called forth the inhabitants of every island, and held them silent, as if spellbound, on the edge of their quays and terraces, till we were out of hearing.

Leaving Murano far behind, Venice and its world of turrets began to sink on the horizon, and the low desert isles beyond Mazorbo to lie stretched out before us. Now we beheld vast wastes of purple flowers, and could distinguish the low hum of the insects which hover above them; such was the silence of the place. Coasting these solitary fields, we wound amongst several serpentine canals, bordered by gardens of figs and pomegranates, with neat Indian-looking inclosures of cane and reed: an aromatic plant clothes the margin of the waters, which the people justly dignify with the title of marine incense. It proved very serviceable in subduing a musky odour, which attacked us the moment we landed, and which proceeds from serpents that lurk in the hedges. These animals, say the gondoliers, defend immense treasures which lie buried under the ruins. Woe to those who attempt invading them, or prying too cautiously about!

Not choosing to be devoured, we left many a mount of fragments unnoticed, and made the best of our way to a little green, free from weeds or adders, bounded on one side by a miserable shed, decorated with the name of the Podesta’s residence, and on the other by a circular church. Some remains of tolerable antique sculpture are enchased in the walls; and the dome, supported by pillars of a smooth Grecian marble, though uncouth and ill-proportioned, impresses a sort of veneration, and transports the fancy to the twilight glimmering period when it was raised.

Having surveyed what little was visible, and given as much career to our imaginations as the scene inspired, we walked over a soil composed of crumbling bricks and cement to the cathedral; whose arches, turned on the ancient Roman principle, convinced us that it dates as high as the sixth or seventh century.

Nothing can well be more fantastic than the ornaments of this structure, formed from the ruins of the Pagan temples of Altina, and incrusted with a gilt mosaic, like that which covers our Edward the Confessor’s tomb. The pavement, composed of various precious marbles, is richer and more beautiful than one could have expected, in a place where every other object savours of the grossest barbarism. At the farther end, beyond the altar, appears a semicircular niche, with seats like the gradines of a diminutive amphitheatre; above rise the quaint forms of the apostles, in red, blue, green, and black mosaic, and in the midst of the goodly group a sort of marble chair, cool and penitential enough, where St. Lorenzo Giustiniani sat to hold a provincial council, the Lord knows how long ago! The fount for holy water stands by the principal entrance, fronting this curious recess, and seems to have belonged to some place of Gentile worship. The figures of horned imps cling round its sides, more devilish, more Egyptian, than any I ever beheld. The dragons on old china are not more whimsical: I longed to have it filled with bats’ blood, and to have sent it by way of present to the Sabbath; I can assure you it would have done honour to their witcheries. The sculpture is not the most delicate, but I cannot say a great deal about it, as but little light reaches the spot where it is fixed. Indeed, the whole church is far from luminous, its windows being narrow and near the roof, with shutters composed of blocks of marble, which nothing but the last whirlwind, one would think, could move from their hinges.

By the time we had examined every nook and corner of this singular edifice, and caught, perhaps, some small portion of sanctity by sitting in San Lorenzo’s chair, dinner was prepared in a neighbouring convent, and the nuns, allured by the sound of our flutes and oboes, peeped out of their cells and showed themselves by dozens at the grate. Some few agreeable faces and interesting eyes enlivened the dark sisterhood; all seemed to catch a gleam of pleasure from the music; two or three of them, probably the last immured, let fall a tear, and suffered the recollection of the world and its profane joys to interrupt for a moment their sacred tranquillity.

We stayed till the sun was low, and the breezes blew cold from the ocean, on purpose that they might listen as long as possible to a harmony which seemed to issue, as the old abbess expressed herself, from the gates of paradise ajar. A thousand benedictions consecrated our departure; twilight came on just as we entered the bark and rowed out upon the waves, agitated by a fresh gale, but fearing nothing under the protection of St. Margherita, whose good wishes our music had secured.

WILLIAM BECKFORD.

CANAL AND BRIDGE

From the Rialto’s edge, I looked into the waters, on whose face Glimmered the reflex of some few faint stars, And two far-flitting lamps of gondoliers, That seemed on that black flat to move alone, 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....

The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and step by step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads high up to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine green and purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching their heads to look into the lofty windows,--blind long ago to their leafy tenderness,--while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well, with the beauty of the sculptor’s soul wrought for ever into the stone. Or Venice lures you in a gondola, into one of her remote canals, where you glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under our work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise; where the innumerable balconies are full of the absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames, gossiping and making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if the city’s mood is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very places where you think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of your forgetfulness, dares a wilder beauty, and enthrals with a yet more unearthly and incredible enchantment.... But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay, what potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal?... For myself, I must count as half lost the year spent in Venice before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There alone can existence have the perfect local flavour. But by what witchery touched, one’s being suffers the common sea-change, till life at last seems to ebb and flow with the tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it would be idle to attempt to tell. I can only take you to our dear little balcony at Casa Falier, and comment not very coherently on the scene upon the water under us....

October is the month of the sunsets, and are best seen from the Public Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind the domes and towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the Redentore. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon is a fine thing; for then the sun goes down into the water with a broad trail of bloody red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had dragged himself landward across the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and died as he reached the land. But we (upon whom the idleness of Venice grows daily, and from whom the Gardens, therefore, grow further and further) are commonly content to take our bit of sunset as we get it from our balcony, through the avenue opened by the narrow canal opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a little rainy, when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate beauty--all tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little palace on the corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the Canalazzo, and from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an airy balcony. When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that pathetic and angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves rich in the neighbourhood of that part of the ‘Palace of Art,’ whereon

‘The light aerial gallery, golden railed, Burnt like a fringe of fire.’

And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga....

About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market, bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the mainland; and far into the night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the boats was company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out again, we found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved Venice, kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet seemed to rest.

W. D. HOWELLS.

BROWNING’S FUNERAL

VENICE, DEC. 15, 1889

Now ‘past they glide,’ and bear the flower-wreathed bier Across the soundless waters, cold and grey, Ere Night falls, sable-vestured and austere, And Day dies in one roseate flush away, While they who follow, tearful, in the train See wonted sights with unfamiliar eyes;-- Like dreams, amid the fevered sleep of pain, Rich domes and frescoed palaces arise. Yet haply, mixed with sorrow, dawns the thought How fit such obsequies for him whose pen Hath given a wondrous poem,[3] passion-fraught,-- Breathing of love and Venice,--unto men: And so hath added to her deathless glory A shining scroll of pure and ageless story.

MACKENZIE BELL.

[3] See ‘In a Gondola,’ p. 136.

BYRON ON THE GRAND CANAL

We started together, Lord Byron and myself, in my little Milanese vehicle, for Fusina,--his portly gondolier, Tito, in a rich livery and most redundant mustachios.... As we proceeded across the lagoon in his gondola, the sun was just setting, and it was an evening such as Romance would have chosen for a first sight of Venice, rising with her ‘tiara of bright towers’ above the wave; while to complete, as might be imagined, the solemn interest of the scene, I beheld it in company with him who had lately given a new life to its glories, and sung of that fair City of the Sea, thus grandly:

‘I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs.’

But, whatever emotions the first sight of such a scene might, under other circumstances, have inspired within me, the mood of the mind in which I now viewed it was altogether the very reverse of what might have been expected. The exuberant gaiety of my companion, and the recollections--anything but romantic--into which our conversation wandered, put at once completely to flight all poetic and historical associations; and our course was, I am almost ashamed to say, one of uninterrupted merriment and laughter, till we found ourselves at the steps of my friend’s palazzo on the Grand Canal.

THOMAS MOORE.

BELOW THE RIALTO: MORNING

Could I but place the reader at the early morning on the quay below the Rialto, when the market boats, full laden, float into groups of golden colour; and let him watch the dashing of the water about their glittering steely heads, and under the shadows of the vine leaves; and show him the purple of the grapes and the figs, and the glowing of the scarlet gourds carried away in long streams upon the waves; and among them, the crimson fish baskets, plashing and sparkling, and flaming as the morning sun falls on their wet tawny sides; and above, the painted sails of the fishing boats, orange and white, scarlet and blue; and better than all such florid colour, the naked, bronzed, burning limbs of the seamen, the last of the old Venetian race, who yet keep the right Giorgione colour on their brows and bosoms!

JOHN RUSKIN.

A VENETIAN MARKET

The gondola was waiting as usual at the corner; it took them but a very little way, and landed them on the quay near the Rialto.... All the pictures out of all the churches were buying and selling in this busy market; Virgins went by, carrying their Infants; St. Peter is bargaining his silver fish; Judas is making a low bow to a fat old monk, who holds up his brown skirts and steps with bare legs into a mysterious black gondola that has been waiting by the bridge, and that silently glides away.... A girl came quietly through the crowd, carrying her head nobly above the rest, and looking straight before her with a sweet and generous face. ‘What a beautiful creature! Brava, brava!’ shrieked Lady W. The girl hung her sweet head and blushed. Titian’s mother, out of the ‘Presentation,’ who was sitting by with her basket of eggs, smiled and patted the young Madonna on her shoulder. ‘They are only saying good things; they mean no harm,’ said the old woman.... Then a cripple went along on his crutches; then came a woman carrying a beautiful little boy, with a sort of turban round her head.... One corner of the market was given up to great hobgoblin pumpkins; tomatoes were heaped in the stalls; oranges and limes were not yet over; but perhaps the fish-stalls are the prettiest of all. Silver fish tied up in stars with olive-green leaves, golden fish, as in miracles, with noble people serving. There are the jewellers’ shops too, but their wares do not glitter so brightly as all this natural beautiful gold and silver.

LADY RITCHIE.

A RIALTO SCENE