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Updated: June 15, 2025
As I floated that afternoon over the lagoons past the Giudecca, and the blue Euganean Hills rose out of the gray mist that seems ever to hang on the Venetian horizon, it was impossible to believe in the fact, to realize that all this human beauty around me, the slow accumulation of the ages of the finest work of man, was in danger of eternal destruction.
In the west is the Piazza, immediately below, with its myriad tables and chairs; then the backs of the S. Moïse statues; and farther away the Frari and its campanile, the huge telegraph-wire carriers of the harbour; across the water Fusina, and beyond in the far distance the jagged Euganean hills. At sunset the landscape is sharpened and brought nearer. And so it will ever be.
Subsequently to this visit Byron lent the villa at Este to his friend, and during the autumn weeks of their residence there were written the lines among the Euganean hills, where, in the same strain of reverence, Shelley refers to the "tempest-cleaving swan of Albion," to the "music flung o'er a mighty thunder-fit," and to the sunlike soul destined to immortalize his ocean refuge,
In my little house on the Euganean hills, I hope to pass my few remaining days in tranquillity, and to have always before my eyes my dead, or my absent, friends."
First comes Antenor, the brother of Priam, who founded Padua with a band of Trojan fugitives; King Dardanus, who defeated Attila in the Euganean hills, followed him in pursuit, and struck him dead at Rimini with a chessboard; the Emperor Henry IV, who built the cathedral; a King Marcus, whose head was preserved in Monselice; then a couple of cardinals and prelates as founders of colleges, churches, and so forth; the famous Augustinian theologian, Fra Alberto; a string of philosophers beginning with Paolo Veneto and the celebrated Pietro of Abano; the jurist Paolo Padovano; then Livy and the poets Petrarch, Mussato, Lovato.
The Euganean hills stand like stupendous pyramids, Egyptian, solemn, against a lemon space on the horizon. The far reaches of the lagoons, the Alps, and islands assume those tones of glowing lilac which are the supreme beauty of Venetian evening. Then, at last, we see the first lamps glitter on the Zattere. The quiet of the night has come.
Hampton Court is the almost breathing society of Charles the Second's reign; the Bodleian Gallery is vivid with Britain's past intellectual life; the history of France is pictured on the walls of Versailles; the luxury of color bred by the sunsets of the Euganean hills, the waters of the Adriatic, the marbles of San Marco, and the skies and atmosphere of Venice, are radiant on the canvas of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese; Michel Angelo has embodied the soul of his era and the loftiest spirit of his country; Salvator typified the half-savage picturesqueness, Neapolitan Claude the atmospheric enchantments, Carlo Dolce the effeminate grace, Titian the voluptuous energy, Guido the placid self-possession, and Raphael and Correggio the religious sentiment of Italy; Watteau put on canvas the fête champêtre; the peasant-life of Spain is pictured by Murillo, her asceticism by the old religious limners; what English rustics were before steam and railroads Gainsborough and Moreland reveal, Wilkie has permanently symbolized Scotch shrewdness and domesticity, and Lawrence framed and fixed the elegant shapes of a London drawing-room; and each of these is a normal type and suggestive exemplar to the imagination, a chapter of romance, a sequestration and initial token of the characteristic and the historical, either of what has become traditional or what is forever true.
The stars were lost in the deep gray-blue of the sky; a solemn stillness, like the presage of some divine event, seemed for a moment to hold the pulses of the universe; then a soft rose crept into the shimmer of the water and crested the snows on the distant Euganean Hills, the transient, many-tinted glory of the east reflected itself in opal lights upon the silver sea, then suddenly swept the landscape in one dazzling glow of gold and the joy-bells rang out.
But soon Verona disappeared, and we were speeding along a level road with far-off purple peaks upon our left, and away in front some floating blue shapes which it thrilled me to hear were actually the Euganean Hills.
In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together with Adonais, the lines Written in the Euganean Hills, Epipsychidion, Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples, A Dream of the Unknown, and many others, Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and a more faultless art than Byron's ever attained, though it lacks the directness and momentum of Byron.
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