In the third week of December, 1878, taking the opportunity of a brief
and undeserved vacation, I went to Venice. On the morning after my
arrival, in answer to a most kind and cordial summons, I presented
myself at the Palazzo Rezzonico. Intense as was the impression he
always made even in London, I think that those of us who met Robert
Browning only in the stress and roar of that metropolis can hardly
have gauged the fullness of his potentialities for impressing. Venice,
"so weak, so quiet," as Mr. Ruskin had called her, was indeed the
ideal setting for one to whom neither of those epithets could by any
possibility 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.
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