The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist, traveller, and eminently each.  I met him afterwards in Rome, which the powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I do not know whether he forgave the powers.  We walked far and long over the Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which came out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he loved and knew so much better than most other men.  I think that the book he would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do not at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written myself.

At Lowell’s table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should find in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire there.  On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm.  We looked through one of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing and looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it.  He died in it, at last.

In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw me aboard a horse-car for Boston.  Before we parted he gave me two charges:  to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think well of women.  He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth shut, and so failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance.  As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the best thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoring women.

ETEXT editor’s bookmarks: 

   Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts
   Bayard Taylor:  incomparable translation of Faust
   Became gratefully strange
   Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
   Charles Reade
   Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it
   Death of the joy that ought to come from work
   Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced
   Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two
   Edward Everett Hale
   Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it
   Emerson
   Espoused the theory of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare
   Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected
   First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to
   Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time
   Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand
   Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love
   Heine
   Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life
   I did not know, and I hated to ask