.

It is quite unnecessary, here, to dwell upon this exquisite flower of
genius in detail. Every one who knows Browning at all knows "Pippa
Passes." Its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity and
a rare high music, by any other Victorian poet: its poetic insight is
such as no other poet than the author of "The Ring and the Book" and
"The Inn Album" can equal. Its technique, moreover, is superb. From the
outset of the tremendous episode of Ottima and Sebald, there is a note
of tragic power which is almost overwhelming. Who has not known what
Jakob Boehme calls "the shudder of a divine excitement" when Luca's
murderer replies to his paramour,

"morning?
It seems to me a night with a sun added."

How deep a note, again, is touched when Sebald exclaims, in allusion to
his murder of Luca, that he was so "wrought upon," though here, it may
be, there is an unconscious reminiscence of the tenser and more
culminative cry of Othello, "but being wrought, perplext in the
extreme." Still more profound a touch is that where Ottima, daring her
lover to the "one thing that must be done; you know what thing: Come in
and help to carry," says, with affected lightsomeness, "This dusty pane
might serve for looking-glass," and simultaneously exclaims, as she
throws them rejectingly from her nervous fingers, "Three, four--four
grey hairs!" then with an almost sublime coquetry of horror turns
abruptly to Sebald, saying with a voice striving vainly to be blithe--

"Is it so you said
A plait of hair should wave across my neck?
No--this way."

Who has not been moved by the tragic grandeur of the verse, as well as
by the dramatic intensity of the episode of the lovers' "crowning
night"?

"_Ottima_. The day of it too, Sebald!
When heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat,
Its black-blue canopy suffered descend
Close on us both, to weigh down each to each,
And smother up all life except our life.
So lay we till the storm came.

_Sebald_. How it came!

_Ottima_. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,