ff to air, you may--condense it
Down to the diamond;--is not metal there,
When o'er the sudden speck my chisel trips?
--Not flesh, as flake off flake I scale, approach,
Lay bare those bluish veins of blood asleep?
Lurks flame in no strange windings where, surprised
By the swift implement sent home at once,
Flushes and glowings radiate and hover
About its track?

But Jules finds that Phene, whom he has been deceived into believing an
intelligence equal to his own, does not understand one word he has said,
is nothing but an uneducated girl; and his dream of perfection in the
marriage of Art and Love vanishes away, and with the deception the aims
and hopes of his art as it has been. And Browning makes this happen of
set purpose, in order that, having lost satisfaction in his art-ideal,
and then his satisfaction in that ideal realised in a woman--having
failed in Art and Love--he may pass on into a higher aim, with a higher
conception, both of art and love, and make a new world, in the woman and
in the art. He is about to accept the failure, to take only to revenge
on his deceivers, when Pippa sings as she is passing, and the song
touches him into finer issues of thought. He sees that Phene's soul is,
like a butterfly, half-loosed from its chrysalis, and ready for flight.
The sight and song awake a truer love, for as yet he has loved Phene
only through his art. Now he is impassioned with pity for a human soul,
and his first new sculpture will be the creation of her soul.

Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff
Be Art--and further, to evoke a soul
From form be nothing? This new soul is mine!

At last, he is borne into self-forgetfulness by love, and finds a man's
salvation. And in that loss of self he drinks of the deep fountain of
art. Aprile found that out. Sordello dies as he discovers it, and Jules,
the moment he has touched its waters with his lip, sees a new realm of
art arise, and loves it with such joy that he knows he will have power
to dwell in its heart, and create from its joy.

One may do whate'er one likes
In Art; the only thing is, to make sure
That one does like it--which takes pains to know.

He breaks all his models up. They are paltry, dead things belonging to a
dead past. "I begin," he cries, "art afresh, in a fresh world,

Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas."

The ideal that fails means the birth of a new ideal. The very centre