Our days glide by as swiftly as those of the "pilgrim stranger" in the hymn that we used to sing at Sunday School. We spend our mornings in churches or at the Accademia, revelling in the gorgeous canvases of Tintoretto, Titian, Paul Veronese, and Carpaccio. The color in Carpaccio's Presentation of Christ in the Temple is beautiful, and as vivid as if it had been painted yesterday, quite equal to Ghirlandajo's in his Adoration of the Magi, which we saw at the Foundling Hospital in Florence. The Child in Carpaccio's Presentation is a happy, smiling human baby, and the three little angels playing upon musical instruments are charming. The most fascinating of these cherubs, however, are in Giovanni Bellini's Madonnas at the Church of the Redentore and at the Frari. Zelphine has bought a dozen photographs of her favorite cherub in the picture in which the Madonna holds the sleeping Babe upon her lap, while the two darling cherubs play to him on mandolins. The little fellow on the right is not as pretty and chubby as his brother; but to prevent jealousy between the two I have bought some of his pictures for my collection.
Of course we spend many hours in and around St. Mark's, for, like the bride of the Scriptures, this church is beautiful within and without. The day after our arrival, on our way home from the Posta and the Rialto, through the Merceria, a part of Venice in which one may really walk a considerable distance, we suddenly stepped into the Piazza of San Marco, with its fluttering pigeons, its arcades, its Clock-tower, and at the end the marvellous façade of the church, rich in color, its gilded mosaics glittering in the sun and the "glorious team of horses" dashing toward us. Since then, wherever we may be going, we always seem to cross the Square of St. Mark, and by sunlight or twilight or moonlight, or even electric light, by which we saw San Marco last night when we went to Florian's for ices, it is always bewilderingly beautiful. Rich and varied, "gorgeous in the wild, luxurious fancies of the East," is St. Mark's; almost too gorgeous it would be, had not time softened and mellowed its vivid colors, and if its setting were not against a sea and sky of surpassing brilliancy.
Palazzo Rezzonico
Our afternoons and evenings are spent on the water or at the Lido, where we have tea in the garden, or with one of our Philadelphia friends who has a cabin, after the Venetian fashion, on this narrow strip of land that runs out into the ocean. It is hot now at mid-day, and one needs to keep out of the sun between the hours of one and four; but after that there is usually a breeze and always coolness at the Lido.
We spent some hours to-day in the Palazzo Rezzonico, which now belongs to Mr. Robert Barrett Browning. One large room on the second floor is filled with furniture and pictures from the Casa Guidi in Florence, among other things Mrs. Browning's little table upon which she wrote her songs for Italy, and her small, old-fashioned, green leather writing-desk, which looked as if she had left it but yesterday, with pen and paper and some pressed flowers inside. On one side of the room, toward the canal, in a recess in the wall, is a little shrine that the poet's son has placed here in memory of his mother. In gold letters on a white ground are the well-known lines from the tablet upon the Casa Guidi.
The poet Browning spent the last weeks of his life in a suite of rooms on the lower floor of the Palazzo Rezzonico, and here he died, which fact is recorded upon a tablet on the outside wall. We stopped to reread the inscription upon the gray palace wall. A young girl who was with her mother in a gondola quite near was reading aloud in English the Italian words upon the tablet, "Robert Browning died in this house, December 12, 1889," and the impressive and quite untranslatable "Venezia pose." With a questioning look at us she repeated the familiar lines from "De Gustibus":
"Open my heart and you will see,
Graven inside of it, 'Italy,'"