Ottima. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect Swift ran the searching tempest overhead; And ever and anon some bright white shaft Burnt thro' the pine-tree roof,- here burnt and there, Yes! How did we ever rise? Was it that we slept? Why did it end? Fresh tapering to a point the ruffled ends Of I felt you, my loose locks 'twixt both your humid lips (My hair is fallen now knot it again!) Sebald. I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now, and now ! This way ? Will you forgive me― be once more My great queen? Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow; Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress, Magnificent in sin. Say that! Sebald. I crown you My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress, But here Pippa passes, singing "God's in his heaven, All's right with the world!" Sebald is stricken with fear and remorse; his paramour becomes hideous in his eyes; he bids her dress her shoulders, wipe off that paint, and leave him, for he hates her! She, the woman, is at least true to her lover, and prays God to be merciful, not to her, but to him. The scene changes to the post-nuptial meeting of Jules and Phene, and then in succession to the other passages and characters we have mentioned. All these persons are vitally affected,- have their lives changed, merely by Pippa's weird and suggestive songs, coming, as if by accident, upon their hearing at that critical moment. With certain reservations this is a strong and delicate conception, admirably worked out. The usual fault is present: the characters, whether students, peasants, or soldiers, all talk like sages; Pippa reasons like a Paracelsus in pantalets,― her intellectual songs are strangely put in the mouth of an ignorant silkwinding girl; Phene is more natural, though mature, even for Italy, at fourteen. Browning's children are old as himself; he rarely sees them objectively. Even in the songs he is awkward, void of lyric grace; if they have the wilding flavor, they have more than need be of specks and gnarledness. In the epilogue Pippa seeks her garret, and, as she disrobes, after artlessly running over the events of her holiday, soliloquizes thus: "Now, one thing I should like really to know! How near I ever might approach all these I only fancied being, this long day — -- Approach, I mean, so as to touch them-so As to.. in some way.. move them if you please, Do good or evil to them some slight way. " Finally, she sleeps,- unconscious of her day's mission,- and of the fact that her own life is to be something more than it has been,- but not until she has murmured these words of a hymn :— "All service is the same with God, With God, whose puppets, best and worst, "Pippa Passes" is a work of pure art, and has a wealth of original fancy and romance, apart from its wisdom, to which every poet will do justice. Its faults are those of style and undue intellectuality. To quote the author's words, in another drama, "Ah? well! he o'er-refines, the scholar's fault! As it is, we accept his work, looking upon it as upon some treasured yet bizarre painting of the mixed school, whose beauties are the more striking for its defects. The former are inherent, the latter external and subordinate. Everything from this poet is, or used to be, of value and interest, and "A Soul's Tragedy " is of both first, for a masterly distinction between the action of sentiment and that founded on principle, and, secondly, for wit, satire, and knowledge of affairs. Ogniben, the Legate, is the most thorough man of the world Browning has drawn. That is a matchless stroke, at the close, where he says: "I have seen four-and-twenty leaders of revolts." It is a consolation to recall this when a pretender arises; his race is measured,- his fall shall surely come. With "Luria," thirty years ago, Browning, whose stage-plays had been failures, and whose closet-dra mas had found too small a reading, made his last attempt, for the present, at dramatic poetry." It remains to examine his miscellaneous after-work, including the long poems which have appeared within the last five years, the most prolific, if not the most creative, period of his untiring life. V. Something of a dramatic character pertains to nearly all of Browning's lyrics. Like his wife, he has preferred to study human hearts rather than the forms of nature. A note to the first collection of his briefer poems places them under the head of Dramatic Pieces. This was at a time when English poets were enslaved to the idyllic method, and forgot that their readers had passions most suggestive to art when exalted above the tranquillity of picturesque repose. Herein Browning justly may claim originality. Even the Laureate combined the art of Keats with the contemplative habit of Words |