I said: "Where is thine ancient fealty fled?--
Where is the ring with which Manin did wed
His bride?" With tearful visage she:
"An eagle with two beaks tore it from me.
Suddenly I arose, and how it came
I know not, but I heard my bridegroom's name."
Poor widow! 't is not he. Yet he may bring--
Who knows?--back to the bride her long-lost ring.
The Venetians of that day dreamed that San Marco might live again, and
the fineness and significance of the poem could not have been lost on
the humblest in Venice, where all were quick to beauty and vividly
remembered that the last Doge who wedded the sea was named, like the
new President, Manin.
I think the Stornelli of the revolutionary period of 1848 have a
peculiar value, because they embody, in forms of artistic perfection,
the evanescent as well as the enduring qualities of popular feeling.
They give us what had otherwise been lost, in the passing humor of
the time. They do not celebrate the battles or the great political
occurrences. If they deal with events at all, is it with events that
express some belief or longing,--rather with what people hoped or
dreamed than with what they did. They sing the Friulan volunteers, who
bore the laurel instead of the olive during Holy Week, in token that
the patriotic war had become a religion; they remind us that the first
fruits of Italian longing for unity were the cannons sent to the
Romans by the Genoese; they tell us that the tricolor was placed in
the hand of the statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Capitol, to signify
that Rome was no more, and that Italy was to be.
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