cy herself to be in turn the four
happiest people in Asolo, and, to realise her fancy as much as she can,
she spends her day in wandering about the town, passing, in the morning,
the shrub-house up the hillside, where Ottima and her lover Sebald have
met; at noon, the house of Jules, over Orcana; in the evening, the
turret on the hill above Asolo, where are Luigi and his mother; and at
night, the palace by the Duomo, now tenanted by Monsignor the Bishop.
These, whom she imagines to be the happiest people in the town, have
all, in reality, arrived at crises of tremendous and tragic importance
to themselves, and, in one instance, to her. Each stands at the
turning-point of a life: Ottima and Sebald, unrepentant, with a crime
behind them; Jules and Phene, two souls brought strangely face to face
by a fate which may prove their salvation or their perdition; Luigi,
irresolute, with a purpose to be performed; Monsignor, undecided, before
a great temptation. Pippa passes, singing, at the moment when these
souls' tragedies seem tending to a fatal end, at the moment when the
baser nature seems about to triumph over the better. Something in the
song, "like any flash that cures the blind," strikes them with a sudden
light; each decides, suddenly; each, according to the terms of his own
nature, is saved. And Pippa passes, unconscious of the influence she has
exerted, as they are but half-aware of the agency of what they take as
an immediate word from God. Each of these four scenes is in dialogue,
the first three in blank verse, the last in prose. Between each is an
interlude, in prose or verse, representing the "talk by the way," of
art-students, Austrian police, and poor girls, all bearing on some part
of the action. Pippa's prologue and epilogue, like her songs, are in
varied lyric verse. The blank verse throughout is the most vivid and
dignified, the most coloured and yet restrained, that Browning ever
wrote; and he never wrote anything better for singing than some of
Pippa's songs.

Of the four principal scenes, by far the greatest is the first, that
between Ottima and her paramour, the German Sebald, on the morning after
the murder of old Luca Gaddi, the woman's husband. It is difficult to
convey in words any notion of its supreme excellence of tragic truth: to
match it we must revert to almost the very finest Elizabethan work. The
representation of Ottima and Sebald, the Italian and the German, is a
singularly acute study of