“Have I told you that there is a chapel which he has restored in honor of his mother—putting up there the inscription by Tommaseo,[3] now above Casa Guidi in Florence?”
In this palace Mr. Browning wrote some of his later poems, and it may well be that it was when he was clad in his singing robes that he perhaps most deeply felt the ineffable charm of Venice:—
“For the stars help me, and the sea bears part;
The very night is clinging
Closer to Venice’ streets to leave one space
Above me. . . .”
It was from these lofty salons in the Browning Palace that the poet passed to the “life more abundant” on that December day of 1889, on the very day that his last volume, “Asolando,” was published and also the last volume of Tennyson’s. Regarding these Mr. Gladstone said, in a letter to Lord Tennyson: “The death of Browning on the day of the appearance of your volume, and we hear of one of his own, is a touching event.”
From the time of Mrs. Browning’s death in Florence (in June of 1861) Mr. Browning never felt that he could see Italy again, until the autumn of 1878, when he, with his sister, Miss Sarianna Browning, came to Venice by way of the Italian lakes and Verona. At this time they only remained for a fortnight, domiciled in the old Palazzo Brandolin-Rota, which was transformed into the Albergo dell’Universo. This palace was on the Grand Canal below the Accadémia, and here he returned through two or three subsequent years. Mr. Browning became very fond of Venice, and he explored its winding ways and gardens and knew it, not merely from the gondola view, but from the point of view of the curious little dark and narrow byways, the bridges, and the piazzas.
It was in 1880 that Mr. Browning first met, through the kind offices of Mr. Story, a most charming and notable American lady, Mrs. Arthur Bronson (Katherine DeKay), who had domiciled herself in Casa Alvisi, an old palace on the Grand Canal opposite the Church of Santa Maria della Salute. She was a woman of very interesting personality, and had drawn about her a circle including many of the most distinguished people of her time, authors, artists, poets, and notable figures in the social world. She was eminently simpatica and her lovely impulses of generous kindness were rendered possible to translate into the world of the actual by the freedom which a large fortune confers on its possessor. Between Mrs. Bronson and Mr. Browning there sprang up one of those rare and beautiful friendships that lasted during his lifetime, and to her appreciation and many courtesies he owed much of the happiness of his later years. In the autumn of 1880 Mrs. Bronson made Mr. Browning and his sister her guests, placing at their disposal a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati—a palace adjoining her own—and each night they dined and passed the evening with her, with music and conversation to enchant the hours. After Mr. Browning’s death, Mrs. Bronson was the friend whom all pilgrims to his shrine in Venice felt it a special privilege to meet and to hear speak of him. In her palace was a large easy-chair, with a ribbon tied across the arms, in which Browning was accustomed to sit, and which was held sacred to him. Mrs. Bronson was an accomplished linguist, and the habitués of her salon represented many nationalities. Among these was the Princess Montenegro, the mother of the present Queen of Italy.
It is little wonder that the Browning Palace was for so many years a focus for all who revered and loved the wedded poets, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
In the marble court, roofed only by the blue Venetian sky, stood Mr. Barrett Browning’s statue of “Dryope” in bronze, on its marble pedestal,—a beautiful conception of the Dryope of Keats,—the dweller in forest solitudes whom the Hamadryads transformed into a poplar. Here a fountain makes music all day long, and the court is also adorned in summer by great Venetian jars of pink hydrangeas in full bloom. The grand staircase, with its carved balustrade and the wide landing where a rose window decorates the wall, leads to the lofty salons which were yet as homelike as they were artistic during the residence of the Brownings. Mr. Story’s bust of Mrs. Browning, other portrait busts of both the poets, sculptured by their artist son, and by others, and other memorials abound. In the library were gathered many interesting volumes, autographed from their authors, and many rare and choice editions, among which was one of the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” in a sumptuous volume whose artistic beauty found a fitting setting to Mrs. Browning’s immortal sonnets. Among other volumes were a collection of signed “Etchings” by Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema; presentation copies from Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Aubrey De Vere, Walter Savage Landor, and many another known to fame; and a copy, also, of a study of Mrs. Browning’s poetry[4] by an American writer.
There is one memento over which the visitor always smiled—a souvenir of a London evening in 1855 when the Brownings had invited Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother and Lord Madox Brown to meet Tennyson and listen to his reading of his new poem, “Maud,” then still unpublished. During the reading Rossetti drew a caricature representing Tennyson with his hair standing on end, his eyes glowering and his hand theatrically extended, as he held a manuscript inscribed,