Feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead ----"

Surely there is nothing in all our literature more poignantly dramatic
than this first part of "Pippa Passes." The strains which Pippa sings
here and throughout are as pathetically fresh and free as a thrush's
song in the heart of a beleaguered city, and as with the same
unconsidered magic. There is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling
tones, caught up in a moment in joyous caprice, in

"_Give her but a least excuse to love me!
When--where----_"

No one of these songs, all acutely apt to the time and the occasion, has
a more overwhelming effect than that which interrupts Ottima and Sebald
at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness,
behind which is the narrow twilit backward way.

"_Ottima_. Bind it thrice about my brow;
Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent in sin. Say that!

_Sebald_. I crown you
My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent..

[_From without is heard the voice of_ PIPPA _singing_--]

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world! [PIPPA _passes_,

_Sebald_. God's in his heaven! Do you hear that?
Who spoke?"

This sweet voice of Pippa reaches the guilty lovers, reaches Luigi in
his tower, hesitating between love and patriotic duty, reaches Jules and
Phene when all the happiness of their unborn years trembles in the
balance, reaches the Prince of the Church just when his conscience is
sore beset by a seductive temptation, reaches one and all at a crucial
moment in the life of each. The ethical lesson of the whole poem is
summed up in

"All service ranks the same with God--
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last nor first,"

and in

"God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!"

"With God there is no lust of Godhood," says Rossetti in "Hand and
Soul": _Und so ist der blaue Himmel grosser als jedes Gewoelk darin, und
dauerhafter dazu_, meditates Jean Paul: "There can be nothing good, as
we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the