ambition revives; they shall be independently powerful. 251-A wonderful picture is presented where the exultant soldier, alone with Palma, describes their conquering future. 253-A sound above arrests them and the end approaches.

Book the Sixth. 255-Fate, conscious of a crisis, pauses with Sordello. 256-He becomes aware that his life has lacked the great motive-power, love. 257-Without its task-master no life is effective. Some external motive must inspire Action, which is a result, never a cause. 259, 260-Sophistry intervenes. Does a Sordello transcend, originate law? Does he not serve men by ministering to himself? 261-He can do much for himself, little for the race. 262-Conscience suggests the value of that little, now exemplified in foregoing the Prefecture. 263-267-Temptation suggests every specious reason against doing so. Sordello's problem is hard. 268-Is not Sordello's complete bliss more than a set-off against an infinitesimal diminution of joy divided among the crowd? 269-He longs for life. Perhaps his world is made to quench his thirst for life. 270, 271-If so, how great the error of refusing the cup for the sake of some future one, and all the while uncertain if he serves mankind perceptibly by his denial! 272-Life!' why have 'sage, champion, martyr,' relinquished it then? He has not their secret. To glean, not forego, experience ever seemed duty to him. 273, 274-Diving deeper into truth, Sordello perceives that Soul and Eternity are hard

to reconcile with their necessary instruments, Matter and Time. Joy comes of their correlation, Sorrow comes when Soul overinforms Matter. 275-Body is short-lived, Soul eternal, and Soul seeking to reconcile their difference only finds Body . . . dead. Such is now the case with Sordello. 277-But the disproportion between Soul and Body may be accepted and used more wisely than Sordello knew. 279-He needed God, and especially God in Christ. 279-Sordello's last act is to spurn selfishness, to tread underfoot the badge. Yet an insect understands adapting means to ends better than Sordello did. 280, 281— Salinguerra, his ambition again cut short, marries Ecelin's youngest daughter and is reabsorbed into Romano. 282-The Ghibellins aggrandise, 283but Taurello at eighty is in easy imprisonment in Venice. 285-Ecelin III. and Alberic deserve their violent ends. 286-Browning retains a tenderness for Eglamor, 287-quotes later Sordello traditions, 288-and describes Sordello's divided Will as a fatal disease. Yet, after all, Eglamor is a singing lark, Sordello a higher being though undeveloped, a child who sings "unintelligible words," but all the while "up and up goes he.”

This briefest of surveys ignores Sordello's encrusted gems; for instance, of quaint adornment, as that wherein the Soldan's pining daughter' figures (p. 129), vivid description, as of the scene and mood when Palma leaves Sordello (p. 64), and wondrous portraiture, as of Ecelin's daughters,

"sly and tall

And curling and compliant" (p. 62).

After Sordello, it will be found that Browning changes his hero, and in Sordello himself we trace the change in process. Browning's characters will always be full of thought, but hereafter the thoughts will be about life, not about self.

Pippa Passes; A Drama, 1841 (Vol. III.), is simpler to understand than the foregoing poems, and the help of a detailed summary is not needed towards enjoying the beauty of it and sounding the depth. Pippa Passes is alternately idyllic and tragic. Fourteen-year-old Pippa, a silk-winder, begins her one annual holiday by deciding that during the day she will fancy herself each of the four people she deems happiest in Asolo. Each is loved, and she is lonely, but Pippa's hymn, the key-note of the piece, declares the service of all God's children to be equally valuable in His sight. So it comes about that Pippa, as she wanders round Asolo through morning, noon, evening, and night, unconsciously influences the lives of those four she is fancying herself, by her songs and the goodness and innocence they breathe. Ottima, Phene, Luigi, Monsignor, all owe to Pippa redemption from evil. Each of the day's four groups is at some crisis of character and action, in which temptation would conquer, but for the better inspiration coming from the passing words. With beautiful 'dramatic justice,' in the

last case, Monsignor's, Browning makes Pippa the unwitting instrument of her own protection.

The Morning of Pippa Passes is in many respects the most powerful scene in Browning. At first, Ottima and her lover attempt a forced disregard of their crime, but vainly. Sebald, the more accessible to remorse, will not drink the red wine, for to his horrified imagination it looks like Luca's blood. It is the crowning ingratitude of having slain the man who was good to him that tortures Sebald. Ottima tries to make him face the deed more coolly, and seems winning him away from conscience, when Pippa passes singing, and Sebald's saving recoil is

Ottima looks no longer

completed by her words. superb, but frightful, and he loathes her. Her replies to his bitter words are intensely dramatic in their eloquent shortness. When Sebald instinctively feels that death is the only expiation for the law of life he has outraged, even Ottima rises out of her selfishness. Buried conscience revives in

Her one impulse now is to protect Sebald, and that being impossible, to die with him. In Pippa Passes and A Soul's Tragedy Browning introduces prose scenes as suitable to unimaginative characters.

When Pippa passes singing at noon, the crisis, if less tremendous, is more touching. The lofty, pure-minded sculptor, tricked and humiliated, is

dismissing the bride who has been palmed upon him, when a new idea, suggested by Pippa's song, strikes him. Instead of being the raised in love, shall he not be the raiser, the sculptor of a moral Galatea, of this woman 'with the new soul'? So the diviner spark is elicited from this apparently hopeless love.

The young patriot, Luigi, who acts from impulse and feelings, believes it his duty to assassinate the Austrian ruler, therefore his temptation lies in being dissuaded from his resolve. His mother works on him to desist, through her love and the remembrance of a young girl, Chiara. Here the most beautiful of Pippa's songs interposes, to remind Luigi that, for the sake of the ideal 'king,' he must destroy the 'Python' at Vienna. The poetry of Noon, especially that exquisite passage beginning ‘last year's sunsets, and great stars,' has the pre-eminence, but the motive of action is not equal to the others. The meanings assigned to duty and temptation are fictitious, and the benefit of Pippa's song is accidental, for only owing to an official blunder is Luigi's departure for Vienna unmolested.

In Part IV., the little silk-winder being found to be Monsignor's niece, whose inheritance he has wrongfully enjoyed, the deadly temptation to have her made away with is dissipated by the sweet words of passing Pippa.

"Suddenly God took me

is the closing line. Hearing this, the Bishop, who