y illustrate all too forcibly Browning's chief fault as a
lyric--and, in this case, as a dramatic--poet. Both of them are frankly
parenthetic; both parentheses are superfluous; neither has any
incidental beauty to redeem it; and, above all, we may be sure that
Pippa did not think in parentheses. The agility and (it were to follow
an indulgent fashion to add) the "subtlety" of Browning's mind too often
led him into like excesses: I deny the subtlety here, for these clauses
are so wholly uninteresting in thought that even as examples I shall not
cite them. But their crowning distastefulness is in the certitude we
feel that, whatever they had been, they never would have occurred to
this lyrical child. The stanza without them is the stanza as Pippa felt
it. . . . In the same way, the opening rhapsody on dawn which precedes
her invocation to the holiday is out of character--impossible to regard
its lavish and gorgeous images as those (however sub-conscious) of an
unlettered girl.

But all carping is forgotten when we reach

"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing"--

a poet's phrase, it is true, yet in no way incongruous with what we can
imagine Pippa to have thought, if not, certainly, in such lovely diction
to have been able to express. Thenceforward, until the episodical lines
on the Martagon lily, the child and her creator are one. There comes the
darling menace to the holiday--

". . . But thou must treat me not
As prosperous ones are treated . . .
For, Day, my holiday, if thou ill-usest
Me, who am only Pippa--old year's sorrow,
Cast off last night, will come again to-morrow:
Whereas, if thou prove gentle, I shall borrow
Sufficient strength of thee for new-year's sorrow.
All other men and women that this earth
Belongs to, who all days alike possess,
Make general plenty cure particular dearth,[26:1]
Get more joy one way, if another less:
Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven
What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven--
Sole light that helps me through the year, thy sun's!"

Having made her threat and her invocation, she falls to thinking of
those "other men and women," and tells her Day about them, like the
child she is. They, she declares, are "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones." Each
is, in the event, to be vitally influenced by her song, as she "passes"
at Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night; but this she knows not at