Landless merchants on mighty fleets, once the Venetians were ambitious and vicious; with four horses from Greece, with a winged lion displacing a speared dragon, with a tetrarch leaving a foot at the end of the West, the great cave prospered over trunks rooted in the clay. The Pillars of Hercules declared a gate to the sealed ocean; Venice proclaimed a node in between two worlds. The blind conqueror built a bank of warfare with the precious gallery and destroyed the firm empire with an arrogant republic; alas, the boughs dropped and the merchants grounded.
J-W.H/A+U&D 