or, sitting at his window in Paris one evening:

How far off Venice seems to-night! How dim
The still-remembered sunsets, with the rim
Of gold round the stone haloes, where they stand,
Those carven saints, and look towards the land,
Right Westward, perched on high, with palm in hand,
Completing the peaked church-front. Oh how clear
And dark against the evening splendour! Steer
Between the graveyard island and the quay,
Where North-winds dash the spray on Venice;--see
The rosy light behind dark dome and tower,
Or gaunt smoke-laden chimney;--mark the power
Of Nature's gentleness, in rise or fall
Of interlinked beauty, to recall
Earth's majesty in desecration's place,
Lending yon grimy pile that dream-like face
Of evening beauty;--note yon rugged cloud,
Red-rimmed and heavy, drooping like a shroud
Over Murano in the dying day.
I see it now as then--so far away!

The face of a boy in the street catches his eye. He seems to see in it
some likeness to a dead friend. He begins to think, and at last
remembers a hospital ward in Venice:

'Twas an April day,
The year Napoleon's troops took Venice--say
The twenty-fifth of April. All alone
Walking the ward, I heard a sick man moan,
In tones so piteous, as his heart would break:
'Lost, lost, and lost again--for Venice' sake!'
I turned. There lay a man no longer young,
Wasted with fever. I had marked, none hung
About his bed, as friends, with tenderness,
And, when the priest went by, he spared to bless,
Glancing perplexed--perhaps mere sullenness.
I stopped and questioned: 'What is lost, my friend?'
'My soul is lost, and now draws near the end.
My soul is surely lost. Send me no priest!
They sing and solemnise the marriage feast
Of man's salvation in the house of love,
And I in Hell, and God in Heaven above,
And Venice safe and fair on earth between--
No love of mine--mere service--for my Queen.'

He was a seaman, and the tale he tells the doctor before he dies is
strange and not a little terrible. Wild rage against a foster-brother
who had bitterly wronged him, and who was one of the ten rulers over
Venice, drives him to make a mad oath that on the day when he does
anything for his country's good he will give his soul to Satan. That
night he sails for Dalmatia, and as he is keeping the watch, he sees a
phantom boat with seven fiends sailing t