[Illustration: 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. On “Thanksgiving Day, 1873,” Lowell wrote to Thomas Hughes: “To-day the weather is triumphant, and my views of life consequently more cheerful. It is so warm that we are going out presently in the gondola, to take up a few dropped stitches. Venice, after all, is incomparable, and during this visit I have penetrated into little slits of streets in every direction on foot. The canals only give one a visiting acquaintance. The _calli_ make you an intimate of the household.” In October, 1881, Lowell wrote to Mr. Gilder from Hotel Danieli: “It is raining; never mind, I am in Venice. Sirocco is doing his worst; I defy him, I am in Venice. I am horribly done; but what can I expect? I am in Venice.” Lord Houghton was living in 1878 at the Pension Suisse, or Hôtel de Rome, on the Grand Canal.