I.

Oh Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls Are level with the waters, there shall be A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls, A loud lament along the sweeping sea! If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee, What should thy sons do?--anything but weep: And yet they only murmur in their sleep. In contrast with their fathers--as the slime, The dull green ooze of the receding deep, Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam, 10 That drives the sailor shipless to his home, Are they to those that were; and thus they creep, Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping streets. Oh! agony--that centuries should reap No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years[235] Of wealth and glory turned to dust and tears; And every monument the stranger meets, Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets; And even the Lion all subdued appears,[236] And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum, 20 With dull and daily dissonance, repeats The echo of thy Tyrant's voice along The soft waves, once all musical to song, That heaved beneath the moonlight with the throng Of gondolas[237]--and to the busy hum Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds Were but the overbeating of the heart, And flow of too much happiness, which needs The aid of age to turn its course apart From the luxuriant and voluptuous flood 30 Of sweet sensations, battling with the blood. But these are better than the gloomy errors, The weeds of nations in their last decay, When Vice walks forth with her unsoftened terrors, And Mirth is madness, and but smiles to slay; And Hope is nothing but a false delay, The sick man's lightning half an hour ere Death, When Faintness, the last mortal birth of Pain, And apathy of limb, the dull beginning Of the cold staggering race which Death is winning, 40 Steals vein by vein and pulse by pulse away; Yet so relieving the o'er-tortured clay, To him appears renewal of his breath, And freedom the mere numbness of his chain; And then he talks of Life, and how again He feels his spirit soaring--albeit weak, And of the fresher air, which he would seek; And as he whispers knows not that he gasps, That his thin finger feels not what it clasps, And so the film comes o'er him--and the dizzy 50 Chamber swims round and round--and shadows busy, At which he vainly catches, flit and gleam, Till the last rattle chokes the strangled scream, And all is ice and blackness,--and the earth That which it was the moment ere our birth.[238]