Casa Alvisi

Invited to "introduce" certain pages of cordial and faithful
reminiscence from another hand, [1]

[1] "Browning in Venice," being Recollections of the late
Katharine De Kay Bronson, with a Prefatory Note by H. J.
(Cornhill Magazine, February, 1902).]

in which a frankly predominant presence seems to live again, I
undertook that office with an interest inevitably somewhat sad--
so passed and gone to-day is so much of the life suggested.
Those who fortunately knew Mrs. Bronson will read into her notes
still more of it--more of her subject, more of herself too, and
of many things--than she gives, and some may well even feel
tempted to do for her what she has done here for her
distinguished friend. In Venice, during a long period, for many
pilgrims, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, originally of New York, was, so
far as society, hospitality, a charming personal welcome were
concerned, almost in sole possession; she had become there, with
time, quite the prime representative of those private amenities
which the Anglo-Saxon abroad is apt to miss just in proportion as
the place visited is publicly wonderful, and in which he
therefore finds a value twice as great as at home. Mrs. Bronson
really earned in this way the gratitude of mingled generations
and races. She sat for twenty years at the wide mouth, as it
were, of the Grand Canal, holding out her hand, with endless
good-nature, patience, charity, to all decently accredited
petitioners, the incessant troop of those either bewilderedly
making or fondly renewing acquaintance with the dazzling city.

[Illustration: CASA ALVISI, VENICE]

Casa Alvisi is directly opposite the high, broad-based florid
church of S. Maria della Salute--so directly that from the
balcony over the water-entrance your eye, crossing the canal,
seems to find the key-hole of the great door right in a line with
it; and there was something in this position that for the time
made all Venice-lovers think of the genial padrona as thus
levying in the most convenient way the toll of curiosity and
sympathy. Every one passed, every one was seen to pass, and few
were those not seen to stop and to return. The most generous of
hostesses died a year ago at Florence; her house knows her no
more--it had ceased to do so for some time before her death; and
the long, pleased procession--the charmed arrivals, the happy
sojourns at anchor, the reluctant departures that made Ca'
Alvisi, as was currently said, a social porto di mare--is,
for remembrance and regret, already a possession of ghosts; so
that, on the spot, at present, the attention ruefully averts
itself from the dear little old faded but once familiarly bright
façade, overtaken at last by the