the arches
Into the forms of saints, was touched with tenderest lucence,
And the angel that stands on the crest of the vast campanile
Bathed his golden vans in the liquid light of the moonbeams.
Black rose the granite pillars that lift the Saint and the Lion;
Black sank the island campanili from distance to distance;
Over the charmed scene there brooded a presence of music,
Subtler than sound, and felt, unheard, in the depth of the spirit.

How can I gather and show you the airy threads of enchantment
Woven that night round my life and forever wrought into my being,
As in our boat we glided away from the glittering city?
Dull at heart I felt, and I looked at the lights in the water,
Blurring their brilliance with tears, while the tresses of eddying
seaweed,
Whirled in the ebbing tide, like the tresses of sea-maidens
drifting
Seaward from palace-haunts, in the moonshine glistened and
darkened.

Sad and vague were my thoughts, and full of fear was the silence;
And, when he turned to speak at last, I trembled to hear him,
Feeling he now must speak of his love, and his life and its
secret,--
Now that the narrowing chances had left but that cruel conclusion,
Else the life-long ache of a love and a trouble unuttered.
Better, my feebleness pleaded, the dreariest doubt that had vexed
me,
Than my life left nothing, not even a doubt to console it;
But, while I trembled and listened, his broken words crumbled to
silence,
And, as though some touch of fate had thrilled him with warning,
Suddenly from me he turned. Our gondola slipped from the shadow
Under a ship lying near, and glided into the moonlight,
Where, in its brightest lustre, another gondola rested.
_I_ saw two lovers there, and he, in the face of the woman,
Saw what has made him mine, my own beloved, forever!
Mine!--but through _what_ tribulation, and awful confusion of
spirit!
Tears that I think of with smiles, and sighs I remember with
laughter,
Agonies full of absurdity, keen, ridiculous anguish,
Ending in depths of blissful shame, and heavenly transports!

III.

White, and estranged as a man who has looked on a spectre, he
mutely
Sank to the place at my side, nor while we returned to the city
Uttered a word of explaining, or comment, or comfort, but only,
With his good-night, incoherently craved my forgive