Although I found her thus, we did not part;[1]
Perchance even dearer in her day of woe,
Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.
XIX.
I can repeople with the past—and of
The present there is still for eye and thought,
And meditation chastened down, enough;
And more, it may be, than I hoped or sought;
And of the happiest moments which were wrought
Within the web of my existence, some
From thee, fair Venice![2] have their colours caught:
There are some feelings Time can not benumb,[3]
Nor Torture shake, or mine would now be cold and dumb.
- ↑ Though I have found her thus we will not part.—[MS. M.]
- ↑ [Shelley, in his Lines written among the Euganean Hills,
- ↑
The Past at least is mine—whate'er may come.
But when the heart is full the lips must needs be dumb.—[MS. M. erased.]
——or else mine now were cold and dumb.—[MS. M.]
Der Geisterscher (Werke, 1819, x. 97, sq.) is laid at Venice. "This [the Doge's palace] was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice—more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller's Armenian, a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the Ghost Seer, and I never walked down St. Mark's by moonlight without thinking of it, and 'at nine o'clock he died!' [For allusion to the same incident, see Rogers's Italy (Poems, 1852, ii. 73).] But I hate things all fiction; and therefore the Merchant and Othello have no great associations for me: but Pierre has."—Letter to Murray, Venice, April 2, 1817. (For an earlier reference to the Ghost-seer, see Oscar of Alva: Poetical Works, 1898, i. 131, note.)]
