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.

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