Venezia, 10th May.
“ ... I came here one day earlier than I anticipated. What can I say! I have no words to express my delight as to Venice and its surroundings—it makes up an hundredfold for my deep disappointment as to Rome. I am in sympathy with everything here—the art, the architecture, the beauty of the city, everything connected with it, the climate, the brightness and joyousness, and most of all perhaps the glorious presence of the sea.... From the first moment, I fell passionately and irretrievably in love with Venice: I should rather be a week here than a month in Rome or even Florence: the noble city is the crown of Italy, and fit to be empress of all cities.
All yesterday afternoon and evening (save an hour on the Piazza and neighbourhood) I spent in a gondola—enjoying it immensely: and after dinner I went out till late at night, listening to the music on the canals. Curiously, after the canals were almost deserted—and I was drifting slowly in a broad stream of moonlight—a casement opened and a woman sang with as divine a voice as in my poem of The Tides of Venice: she was also such a woman as there imagined—and I felt that the poem was a true forecast. Early this morning I went to the magnificent St. Mark’s (not only infinitely nobler than St. Peter’s, but to me more impressive than all the Churches in Rome taken together). I then went to the Lido, and had a glorious swim in the heavy sea that was rolling in. On my return I found that Addington Symonds had called on me—and I am expecting W. D. Howells. I had also a kind note from Ouida.
Life, joyousness, brightness everywhere—oh, I am so happy! I wish I were a bird, so that I could sing out the joy and delight in my heart. After the oppression of Rome, the ghastliness of Assisi, the heat and dust of Florence—Venice is like Paradise. Summer is everywhere here—on the Lido there were hundreds of butterflies, lizards, bees, birds, and some heavenly larks—a perfect glow and tumult of life—and I shivered with happiness. The cool fresh joyous wind blew across the waves white with foam and gay with the bronze-sailed fisher-boats—the long wavy grass was sweet-scented and delicious—the acacias were in blossom of white—life—dear, wonderful, changeful, passionate, joyous life everywhere! I shall never forget this day—never, never. Don’t despise me when I tell you that once it overcame me, quite; but the tears were only from excess of happiness, from the passionate delight of getting back again to the Mother whom I love in Nature, with her wind-caresses and her magic breath.”
The weeks in Venice gave my correspondent the crowning pleasure of his Italian sojourn; Venetian art appealed to him beyond that of any other school. The frequent companionship of John Addington Symonds, the long hours in the gondola, in the near and distant lagoons were a perpetual joy to him. June he spent in the Ardennes with my mother and me—at Dinant, at Anseremme and at La Roche. They were happy days which we spent chiefly in a little boat sailing up the Lesse, dragging it over the shallows, or resting in the green shade of oak and beech trees.
In July he was once more in London and hard at work. Among other things he had contributed a series of articles on the Etrurian Cities to the Glasgow Herald, and followed them with letters descriptive of the Ardennes, then relatively little known. In August he packed all his Italian notes, and joined his mother and sisters at Innellan on the Clyde, and later he visited Sir Noel Paton in Arran, whence he wandered over many of his old loved haunts in Loch Fyne, in Mull and in Iona.
On his way back to London—where he was to take up his work as Art Critic to the Glasgow Herald—a serious misadventure befell him. His portmanteau with all his precious Italian photographs, notes and other MSS. was lost. Nowhere could he trace it, and he had to return without it. He was in despair; for it meant not only the loss of material for future commissions, but the loss of work already finished, and in process.
It was a wet August; and his search through the various places he had passed on the Clyde was made in pouring rain. Again and again on the steamers and on the piers he was soaked during those miserable days. He settled in London at 13 Thorngate Road, Sutherland Gardens, in deep depression; his persistent appeals to the Railway Company were unavailing. As the autumn advanced his old enemy rheumatism took hold of him, and he was laid low again with rheumatic fever, which this time attacked his heart mainly. His sister Mary came up to town and she and I nursed him. The best tonic however toward recovery was the reappearance of the lost portmanteau with its much mourned over contents in a soaked and sodden condition, but still legible and serviceable.
In the Introduction to a selection of Philip Marston’s Poems my husband relates that:
“During the spring months of 1884 I was residing at Dover, and in April Marston came down from London to spend a week or so with me. The weather was perfect, and our walks by shore and cliff were full of delight to us both. Once or twice we crossed to Calais for the sake of the sail, and spent a few hours in the old French port, and returned by the afternoon boat. In the evenings, after dinner, we invariably adjourned to the beach, either under the eastern bluffs, or along the base of Shakespeare’s Cliff, for the music of the sea, in calm or tidal turbulence or tempest, had an unfailing fascination for him.