rbid olive faultless shoulder-blades--
I should have known there was no blood beneath!"

For though the heaven-song have pierced him, not yet is Sebald reborn,
not yet can aught of generosity involve him. Still he speaks "of her,
not to her," deaf in the old selfishness and baseness. He can cry, amid
his vivid recognition of another's guilt, that "the little peasant's
voice has righted all again"--can be sure that _he_ knows "which is
better, vice or virtue, purity or lust, nature or trick," and in the
high nobility of such repentance as flings the worst of blame upon the
other one, will grant himself lost, it is true, but "proud to feel such
torments," to "pay the price of his deed" (ready with phrases now, he
also!), as, poor weakling, he stabs himself, leaving his final word to
her who had been for him all that she as yet knew how to be, in--

"I hate, hate--curse you! God's in his heaven!"

* * * * *

Now, at this crisis, we are fully shown what, in despite of other
commentators,[49:1] I am convinced that Browning meant us to perceive
from the first--that Ottima's is the nobler spirit of the two. Her lover
has stabbed himself, but she, not yet realising it, flings herself upon
him, wrests the dagger--

". . . Me!
Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself--kill me!
Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me--then
Yourself--then--presently--first hear me speak!
I always meant to kill myself--wait, you!
_Lean on my breast--not as a breast; don't love me
The more because you lean on me, my own
Heart's Sebald!_ There, there, both deaths presently!"

* * * * *

Here at last is the whole woman. "Lean on my breast--not as a breast";
"Mine is the whole crime"; "I always meant to kill myself--wait, you!"
She will relinquish even her sense of womanhood; no word of blame for
him; she would die, that he might live forgetting her, but it is too
late for that, so "There, there, both deaths presently." . . . And now
let us read again the lamentable dying words of Sebald. It is even more
than I have said: not only are we meant to understand that Ottima's is
the nobler spirit, but (I think) that not alone the passing of Pippa
with her song has drawn this wealth of beauty from the broken woman's
soul. Always it was there; it needed but the loved one's need to pour
itself before h