The first line takes the reader into the very heart of the city and is one of the best-known single lines in all poetry.

Familiar as the stanzas are, it would be ridiculous to write of Byron in Venice without quoting them again:-- I stood in Venice, on the "Bridge of Sighs"; A Palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the Enchanter's wand: A thousand Years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Looked to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.
She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from Ocean, Rising with her tiara of proud towers At airy distance, with majestic motion, A ruler of the waters and their powers: And such she was;--her daughters had their dowers From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity increased.
[Illustration: THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST FROM THE PAINTING BY CIMA _In the Church of S.Giovanni in Bragora_] Byron wrote also, in 1818, an "Ode on Venice," a regret for its decay, in spirit not unlike the succeeding _Childe Harold_ stanzas which I do not here quote.

Here too he planned _Marino Faliero_, talking it over with his guest, "Monk" Lewis.

Another Venetian play of Byron's was _The Two Foscari_, and both prove that he attacked the old chronicles to some purpose and with all his brilliant thoroughness.

None the less he made a few blunders, as when in _The Two Foscari_ there is an allusion to the Bridge of Sighs, which was not, as it happens, built for more than a century after the date of the play.
No city, however alluring, could be Byron's home for long, and this second sojourn in Venice was not made any simpler by the presence of his daughter Ada.