Note 394 — CANTO THE FOURTH[375]
Reading edition
[Compare the opening lines of Byron's Ode on Venice—
"Oh Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls Are level with the waters, there shall be A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls, A loud lament along the sweeping sea!"
Shelley, too, in his Lines written among the Euganean Hills, bewailed the approaching doom of the "sea-girt city." But threatened cities, like threatened men, live long, and since its annexation to Italy, in 1866, a revival of trade and the re-establishment of the arsenal have brought back a certain measure of prosperity.]