have been deemed applicable.  The steamboats that now wake the echoes of the canals had not yet been imported; but the vitality of the imported poet was in some measure a preparation for them.  It did not, however, find me quite prepared for itself, and I am afraid that some minutes must have elapsed before I could, as it were, find my feet in the torrent of his geniality and high spirits, and give him news of his friends in London.

He was at that time engaged in revising the proof-sheets of “Dramatic Idylls,” and after luncheon, to which he very kindly bade me remain, he read aloud certain selected passages.  The yellow haze of a wintry Venetian sunshine poured in through the vast windows of his salone, making an aureole around his silvered head.  I would give much to live that hour over again.  But it was vouchsafed in days before the Browning Society came and made everything so simple for us all.  I am afraid that after a few minutes I sat enraptured by the sound rather than by the sense of the lines.  I find, in the notes I made of the occasion, that I figured myself as plunging through some enchanted thicket on the back of an inspired bull.

That evening, as I was strolling in Piazza San Marco, my thoughts of Browning were all of a sudden scattered by the vision of a small, thick-set man seated at one of the tables in the Cafe Florian.  This was—­and my heart leapt like a young trout when I saw that it could be none other than—­Henrik Ibsen.  Whether joy or fear was the predominant emotion in me, I should be hard put to it to say.  It had been my privilege to correspond extensively with the great Scandinavian, and to be frequently received by him, some years earlier than the date of which I write, in Rome.  In that city haunted by the shades of so many Emperors and Popes I had felt comparatively at ease even in Ibsen’s presence.  But seated here in the homelier decay of Venice, closely buttoned in his black surcoat and crowned with his uncompromising top-hat, with the lights of the Piazza flashing back wanly from his gold-rimmed spectacles, and his lips tight-shut like some steel trap into which our poor humanity had just fallen, he seemed to constitute a menace under which the boldest might well quail.  Nevertheless, I took my courage in both hands, and laid it as a kind of votive offering on the little table before him.

My reward was in the surprising amiability that he then and afterwards displayed.  My travelling had indeed been doubly blessed, for, whilst my subsequent afternoons were spent in Browning’s presence, my evenings fell with regularity into the charge of Ibsen.  One of these evenings is for me “prouder, more laurel’d than the rest” as having been the occasion when he read to me the MS. of a play which he had just completed.  He was staying at the Hotel Danieli, an edifice famous for having been, rather more than forty years previously, the socket in which the flame of an historic grande passion