[120]
Have you ever thought what a world his eyes opened on--fair, searching
eyes of youth? What a world of mighty life, from those mountain roots
to the shore;--of loveliest life, when he went down, yet so young, to
the marble city--and became himself as a fiery heart to it?
A city of marble, did I say? nay, rather a golden city, paved with
emerald. For truly, every pinnacle and turret glanced or glowed,
overlaid with gold, or bossed with jasper. Beneath, the unsullied sea
drew in deep breathing, to and fro, its eddies of green wave.
Deep-hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea,--the men of Venice moved
in sway of power and war; pure as her pillars of alabaster, stood her
mothers and maidens; from foot to brow, all noble, walked her knights;
the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armour shot angrily under their
blood-red mantle-folds. Fearless, faithful, patient, impenetrable,
implacable,--every word a fate--sate her senate. In hope and honour,
lulled by flowing of wave around their isles of sacred sand, each with
his name written and the cross graved at his side, lay her dead. A
wonderful piece of world. Rather, itself a world. It lay along the face
of the waters, no larger, as its captains saw it from their masts at
evening, than a bar of sunset that could not pass away; but for its
power, it must have seemed to them as if they were sailing in the
expanse of heaven, and this a great planet, whose orient edge widened
through ether.
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