I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
   A palace and a prison on each hand: 
   I saw from out the wave her structures 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
   Looked to the winged Lion’s marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

II.

   She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
   Rising with her tiara of proud towers
   At airy distance, with majestic motion,
   A ruler of the waters and their powers: 
   And such she was; her daughters had their dowers
   From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
   Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers. 
   In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity increased.

III.

   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: 
   Those days are gone—­but beauty still is here. 
   States fall, arts fade—­but Nature doth not die,
   Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
   The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!

IV.

   But unto us she hath a spell beyond
   Her name in story, and her long array
   Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond
   Above the dogeless city’s vanished sway;
   Ours is a trophy which will not decay
   With the Rialto; Shylock and the Moor,
   And Pierre, cannot be swept or worn away —
   The keystones of the arch! though all were o’er,
For us repeopled were the solitary shore.

V.

   The beings of the mind are not of clay;
   Essentially immortal, they create
   And multiply in us a brighter ray
   And more beloved existence:  that which Fate
   Prohibits to dull life, in this our state
   Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied,
   First exiles, then replaces what we hate;
   Watering the heart whose early flowers have died,
And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.

VI.

   Such is the refuge of our youth and age,
   The first from Hope, the last from Vacancy;
   And this worn feeling peoples many a page,
   And, may be, that which grows beneath mine eye: 
   Yet there are things whose strong reality
   Outshines our fairy-land; in shape and hues
   More beautiful than our fantastic sky,
   And the strange constellations which the Muse
O’er her wild universe is skilful to diffuse: