A Venetian Story.
1.

Bianca! — fair Bianca! — who could dwell

With safety on her dark and hazel gaze,

Nor find there lurk’d in it a witching spell,

Fatal to balmy nights and blessed days?

The peaceful breath that made the bosom swell,

She turn’d to gas, and set it in a blaze;

Each eye of hers had Love’s Eupyrion in it,

That he could light his link at in a minute.
2.

So that, wherever in her charms she shone,

A thousand breasts were kindled into flame;

Maidens who cursed her looks forgot their own,

And beaux were turn’d to flambeaux where she came;

All hearts indeed were conquer’d but her own,

Which none could ever temper down or tame:

In short, to take our haberdasher’s hints,

She might have written over it — “from Flints.”
3.

She was, in truth, the wonder of her sex,

At least in Venice — where with eyes of brown

Tenderly languid, ladies seldom vex

An amorous gentle with a needless frown;

Where gondolas convey guitars by pecks,

And Love at casements climbeth up and down,

Whom for his tricks and custom in that kind,

Some have considered a Venetian blind.
4.

Howbeit, this difference was quickly taught,

Amongst more youths who had this cruel jailer,

To hapless Julio — all in vain he sought

With each new moon his hatter and his tailor;

In vain the richest padusoy he bought,

And went in bran new beaver to assail her —

As if to show that Love had made him smart

All over — and not merely round his heart.
5.

In vain he labor’d thro’ the sylvan park

Bianca haunted in — that where she came,

Her learned eyes in wandering might mark

The twisted cypher of her maiden name,

Wholesomely going thro’ a course of bark:

No one was touched or troubled by his flame,

Except the Dryads, those old maids that grow

In trees — like wooden dolls in embryo.
6.

In vain complaining elegies he writ,

And taught his tuneful instrument to grieve,

And sang in quavers how his heart was split,

Constant beneath her lattice with each eve;

She mock’d his wooing with her wicked wit,

And slash’d his suit so that it matched his sleeve,

Till he grew silent at the vesper star,

And, quite despairing, hamstring’d his guitar.
7.

Bianca’s heart was coldly frosted o’er

With snows unmelting — an eternal sheet,

But his was red within him, like the core

Of old Vesuvius, with perpetual heat;

And oft he longed internally to pour

His flames and glowing lava at her feet,

But when his burnings he began to spout.

She stopp’d his mouth, and put the crater out.
8.

Meanwhile he wasted in the eyes of men,

So thin, he seem’d a sort of skeleton-key

Suspended at death’s door — so pale — and then

He turn’d as nervous as an aspen tree;

The life of man is three score years and ten,

But he was perishing at twenty-three,

For people truly said, as grief grew stronger,

“It could not shorten his poor life — much longer.”
9.

For why, he neither slept, nor drank, nor fed,

Nor relished any kind of mirth below;

Fire in his heart, and frenzy in his head,

Love had become his universal foe,

Salt in his sugar — nightmare in his bed,

At last, no wonder wretched Julio,

A sorrow-ridden thing, in utter dearth

Of hope — made up his mind to cut her girth!
10.

For hapless lovers always died of old,

Sooner than chew reflection’s bitter cud;

So Thisbe stuck herself, what time ’tis told,

The tender-hearted mulberries wept blood;

And so poor Sappho when her boy was cold,

Drown’d her salt tear drops in a salter flood,

Their fame still breathing, tho’ their breath be past,

For those old suitors lived beyond their last.
11.

So Julio went to drown — when life was dull,

But took his corks, and merely had a bath;

And once he pull’d a trigger at his skull,

But merely broke a window in his wrath;

And once, his hopeless being to annul,

He tied a pack-thread to a beam of lath,

A line so ample, ’twas a query whether

’Twas meant to be a halter or a tether.
12.

Smile not in scorn, that Julio did not thrust

His sorrows thro’—’tis horrible to die!

And come down, with our little all of dust,

That dun of all the duns to satisfy:

To leave life’s pleasant city as we must,

In Death’s most dreary spunging-house to lie,

Where even all our personals must go

To pay the debt of nature that we owe!
13.

So Julio liv’d:—’twas nothing but a pet

He took at life — a momentary spite;

Besides, he hoped that time would some day get

The better of love’s flame, howover bright;

A thing that time has never compass’d yet,

For love, we know, is an immortal light.

Like that old fire, that, quite beyond a doubt,

Was always in — for none have found it out.
14.

Meanwhile, Bianca dream’d —’twas once when Night

Along the darken’d plain began to creep,

Like a young Hottentot, whose eyes are bright,

Altho’ in skin as sooty as a sweep:

The flow’rs had shut their eyes — the zephyr light

Was gone, for it had rock’d the leaves to sleep.

And all the little birds had laid their heads

Under their wings — sleeping in feather beds.
15.

Lone in her chamber sate the dark-ey’d maid,

By easy stages jaunting thro’ her pray’rs,

But list’ning side-long to a serenade,

That robb’d the saints a little of their shares;

For Julio underneath the lattice play’d

His Deh Vieni, and such amorous airs,

Born only underneath Italian skies,

Where every fiddle has a Bridge of Sighs.
16.

Sweet was the tune — the words were even sweeter —

Praising her eyes, her lips, her nose, her hair,

With all the common tropes wherewith in metre

The hackney poets overcharge their fair.

Her shape was like Diana’s, but completer;

Her brow with Grecian Helen’s might compare:

Cupid, alas! was cruel Sagittarius,

Julio — the weeping water-man Aquarius.
17.

Now, after listing to such laudings rare,

’Twas very natural indeed to go —

What if she did postpone one little pray’r —

To ask her mirror “if it was not so?”

’Twas a large mirror, none the worse for wear,

Reflecting her at once from top to toe:

And there she gazed upon that glossy track,

That show’d her front face tho’ it “gave her back............