ning 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_ had finally sunk
and guttered out with no inconsiderable accompaniment of smoke and
odour. It was there, in an upper room, that I now made acquaintance
with a couple very different from George Sand and Alfred de Musset,
though destined to become hardly less famous than they. I refer to
Torvald and Nora Helmer. My host read to me with the utmost vivacit