y,
standing in the middle of the apartment; and I remember that in
the scene where Nora Helmer dances the tarantella her creator
instinctively executed a few illustrative steps.

During those days I felt very much as might a minnow swimming to and
fro between Leviathan on the one hand and Behemoth on the other--a
minnow tremulously pleased, but ever wistful for some means of
bringing his two enormous acquaintances together. On the afternoon of
December 24th I confided to Browning my aspiration. He had never heard
of this brother poet and dramatist, whose fame indeed was at that time
still mainly Boreal; but he cried out with the greatest heartiness,
"Capital! Bring him round with you at one o'clock to-morrow for turkey
and plum-pudding!"

I betook myself straight to the Hotel Danieli, hoping against hope
that Ibsen's sole answer would not be a comminatory grunt and an
instant rupture of all future relations with myself. At first he was
indeed resolute not to go. He had never heard of this Herr Browning.
(It was one of the strengths of his strange, crustacean genius that
he never had heard of anybody.) I took it on myself to say that
Herr Browning would send his private gondola, propelled by his two
gondoliers, to conduct Herr Ibsen to the scene of the festivity. I
think it was this prospect that made him gradually unbend, for he had
already acquired that taste for pomp and circumstance which was so
notable a characteristic of his later years. I hastened back to the
Palazzo Rezzonico before he could change his mind. I need hardly say
that Browning instantly consented to send the gondola. So large
and lovable was his nature that, had he owned a thousand of those
conveyances, he would not have hesitated to send out the whole fleet
in honour of any friend of any friend of his.

Next day, as I followed Ibsen down the Danielian water-steps into the
expectant gondola, my emotion was such that I was tempted to snatch
from him his neatly-furled umbrella and spread it out over his head,
like the umbrella beneath which the Doges of days gone by had made
their appearances in public. It was perhaps a pity that I repressed
this impulse. Ibsen seemed to be already regretting that he had
unbent. I could not help thinking, as we floated along the Riva
Schiavoni, that he looked like some particularly ruthless member of
the Council of Ten. I did, however, try faintly to attune him in
some sort to the spirit of our host and of the day