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 vivacity, standing in the middle of the apartment; and I remember that in the scene where Nora Helmer dances the tarantella her creator instinctively executed a few illustrative steps.

During those days I felt very much as might a minnow swimming to and fro between Leviathan on the one hand and Behemoth on the other—­a minnow tremulously pleased, but ever wistful for some means of bringing his two enormous acquaintances together.  On the afternoon of December 24th I confided to Browning my aspiration.  He had never heard of this brother poet and dramatist, whose fame indeed was at that time still mainly Boreal; but he cried out with the greatest heartiness, “Capital!  Bring him round with you at one o’clock to-morrow for turkey and plum-pudding!”

I betook myself straight to the Hotel Danieli, hoping against hope that Ibsen’s sole answer would not be a comminatory grunt and an instant rupture of all future relations with myself.  At first he was indeed resolute not to go.  He had never heard of this Herr Browning.  (It was one of the strengths of his strange, crustacean genius that he never had heard of anybody.) I took it on myself to say that Herr Browning would send his private gondola, propelled by his two gondoliers, to conduct Herr Ibsen to the scene of the festivity.  I think it was this prospect that made him gradually unbend, for he had already acquired that taste for pomp and circumstance which was so notable a characteristic of his later years.  I hastened back to the Palazzo Rezzonico before he could change his mind.  I need hardly say that Browning instantly consented to send the gondola.  So large and lovable was his nature that, had he owned a thousand of those conveyances, he would not have hesitated to send out the whole fleet in honour of any friend of any friend of his.

Next day, as I followed Ibsen down the Danielian water-steps into the expectant gondola, my emotion was such that I was tempted to snatch from him his neatly-furled umbrella and spread it out over his head, like the umbrella beneath which the Doges of days gone by had made their appearances in public.  It was perhaps a pity that I repressed this impulse.  Ibsen seemed to be already regretting that he had unbent.  I could not help thinking, as we floated along the Riva Schiavoni, that he looked like some particularly ruthless member of the Council of Ten.  I did, however, try faintly to attune him in some sort to the spirit of our host and of the day of the year.  I adumbrated Browning’s outlook on life, translating into Norwegian, I well remember, the words “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.”  In fact I cannot charge myself with not having done what I could.  I can only lament that it was not enough.