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.
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