m over the promise of his early poems died quite away. Late in
life Mr. Browning commented on this period of his literary career as a
time of "prolonged desolateness." Yet the years 1841-1846 are the years
in which he attained his poetic maturity, and years in which he did some
of his best work. During this period he brought out the series somewhat
fancifully called _Bells and Pomegranates_. The phrase itself comes from
_Exodus_ xxviii, 33, 34. As a title Browning explained it to mean
"something like a mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense,
poetry with thought." This cheap serial edition, the separate numbers of
which sold at first at sixpence and later at half a crown, included
_Pippa Passes_, _King Victor and King Charles_, _Dramatic Lyrics_, _The
Return of the Druses_, _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, _Colombe's Birthday_,
_Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_, _Luria_, and _A Soul's Tragedy_.

All of Browning's plays except _Strafford_ and _In a Balcony_ came out
of this series. The most beautiful of them all, _Pippa Passes_, appeared
in 1841. It is hardly a drama at all in the conventional sense, though
it has one scene, that between Ottima and Sebald, of the highest
dramatic power; but it has always been a favorite with readers. When it
was published Miss Barrett wrote to Mr. Browning that she found it in
her heart to covet the authorship of this poem more than any other of
his works, and he said in answer that he, too, liked _Pippa_ better than
anything else he had yet done. Mr. Sharp, while emphasizing the
undramatic quality of the play, counts it "the most imperishable because
the most nearly immaculate of Browning's dramatic poems." "It seems to
me," he adds, "like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough
for the sinking plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of
life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is
known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought
which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition by its
author, that quality of symmetry, that _symmetria prisca_ recorded of
Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might
be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain
work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air....
Everyone who knows Browning at all knows _Pippa Passes_."

Of the seven dramas published in _Bells and Pomegranates_ there is
comparatively little s