In 1845 Mrs. Jameson wrote to Catharine Sedgwick: “Did you visit Venice? I forget. In the world there is nothing like it. It seems to me that we can find a similitude for everything else, but Venice is like nothing else—Venice the beautiful, the wonderful. I had seen it before, but it was as new to me as if unbeheld; and every morning when I arose I was still in the same state of wonder and enchantment.” She made several visits to Venice, but she gave no hint as to her places of lodgement here.
George Eliot and Lewes arrived in Venice on the night of the 4th June, 1860. “What stillness!” she wrote, “what beauty! Looking out from the high windows of our hotel, I
THE “NOAH CORNER” OF THE DOGE’S PALACE
felt it was a pity to go to bed. Venice was more beautiful than romance had feigned.”
On the 15th May, 1864, she wrote to the Trollopes, from the Hôtel de Ville: “We reached Venice three days ago, and have the delight of finding everything more beautiful than it was to us four years ago.” Her last visit to Venice was made with Mr. Cross, in the summer of 1880, when her husband was very ill at the Hotel Europa.
Nearly opposite the Europa, on the Grand Canal, stands the Casa Simitecolo, in the parish of S. Gregorio, where Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson died, on the 24th January, 1894. She had, during the preceding year, occupied apartments in the Casa Biondetti, on the same side of the Canal, but nearer the Suspension-Bridge. As was her own desire, Miss Woolson was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
Mr. Hare says that Châteaubriand was once a guest at the Europa; and that Wagner, in the same house, wrote a certain Literary-Musical Landmark, called Tristram and Isolde. Wagner died in 1883, in the Palazzo Vendramin Calerghi, on the Grand Canal, a fine mansion, dating back to the end of the Fifteenth Century. It is opposite the Museo Civico, and is sometimes called the “Non Nobis Palace,” because of the inscription “Non Nobis Domine, Non Nobis,” in great letters across its front.
In the month of May, 1869, Helen Hunt wrote: “We are most comfortably established at the Hotel Vittoria, not on the Grand Canal, thank Heaven! When N—— at first said that she did not dare to stay on the Grand Canal, because she feared too much sea air, I was quite dismayed. But now I am thankful enough to have dry land, that is, a stone floor laid on piles, on one side of our house. I look down from any window into one of the cracks called streets; the people look as if they were being threaded into the Scriptural needle’s eye, and a hand-organ looks like a barricade.” “Cracks called streets” is good.