+

All at once she realises that in thus lingering over her toilet, she is
letting some of her precious time slip by for naught, and betakes
herself to washing her face and hands--

"Aha, you foolhardy sunbeam caught
With a single splash from my ewer!
You that would mock the best pursuer,
Was my basin over-deep?

One splash of water ruins you asleep,
And up, up, fleet your brilliant bits.

* * * * *

Now grow together on the ceiling!
That will task your wits."

Here we light on a trait in Browning of which Mr. Chesterton most
happily speaks--his use of "homely and practical images . . . allusions,
bordering on what many would call the commonplace," in which he "is
indeed true to the actual and abiding spirit of love," and by which he
"awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common
and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to
utter." Mr. Chesterton, it is true, speaks of this "astonishing realism"
in relation to Browning's love-poetry, and _Pippa Passes_ is not a
love-poem; but the insight of the comment is no less admirable when we
use it to enhance a passage such as this. Who has not caught the sunbeam
asleep in the mere washhand basin as water was poured out for the mere
daily toilet--and felt that heartening gratitude for the symbol of
captured joy, which made the instant typic and immortal? For these are
the things that all may have, as Pippa had. The ambushing of that beam
and the ordering it, in her sweet wayward imperiousness, to

". . . grow together on the ceiling.
That will task your wits!"

--is one of the most enchanting moments in this lovely poem. The sunbeam
settles by degrees (I wish that she had not been made to term it, with
all too Browningesque agility, "the radiant cripple"), and finally
lights on her Martagon lily, which is a lily with purple flowers. . . .
Here again, for a moment, she ceases to be the lyrical child, and turns
into the Browning (to cite Mr. Chesterton again) to whom Nature really
meant such things as the basket of jelly-fish in _The Englishman in
Italy_, or the stomach-cyst in _Mr. Sludge the Medium_--"the
monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea." To me, these lines on
the purple lily are not only ugly and grotesque--in that kind of
ugliness which "was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a
quite unnecessary luxur