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 the Italian and German races.  Sebald, in a sudden access of brutal rage, has killed the old doting husband, but his conscience, too feeble to stay his hand before, is awake to torture him after the deed.  But Ottima is steadfast in evil, with the Italian conscienceless resoluteness.  She can no more feel either fear or remorse than Clytaemnestra.  The scene between Jules, the French sculptor, and his bride Phene, and that between Luigi, the light-headed Italian patriot, and his mother, are less great indeed, less tragic and intense and overpowering, than this crowning episode; but they are scarcely less fine and finished in a somewhat slighter style.  Both are full of colour and music, of insight into nature and into art, and of superb lines and passages, such as this, which is spoken by Luigi:—­

      “God must be glad one loves his world so much. 
      I can give news of earth to all the dead
      Who ask me:—­last year’s sunsets, and great stars
      That had a right to come first and see ebb
      The crimson wave that drifts the sun away—­
      Those crescent moons with notched and burning rims
      That strengthened into sharp fire, and there stood,
      Impatient of the azure—­and that day
      In March, a double rainbow stopped the storm—­
      May’s warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights—­
      Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!”