Part 6 (1/2)

”_Ottima_ The day of it too, Sebald!

When heaven's pillars seemed o'erboith 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 teht white shaft Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, As if God's ed his weapon at a venture, Feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke The thunder like a whole sea overhead ----”

Surely there is nothing in all our literature nantly 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 sa of the ht up in a moment in joyous caprice, in

”_Give her but a least excuse to love s, all acutely apt to the ti effect than that which interrupts Ottima and Sebald at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness, behind which is the narroilit backay

”_Ottima_ Bind it thrice about nificent in sin Say that!

_Sebald_ I crown you My great white queen, nificent

[_Fro_--]

The year's at the spring, And day's at the '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 Hirosser als jedes Gewolk darin, und dauerhafter dazu_, ood, as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient,” utters the Orientalto know that many of the nature touches were indirectly due to the poet's solitary rambles, by dawn, sundown, and ”dewy eve,” in the wooded districts south of Dulwich, at Hatcham, and upon Wimbledon Common, whither he was often wont to wander and to ramble for hours, and where he composed one day the well-known lines upon Shelley, withHere, too, it was, that Carlyle, riding for exercise, was stopped by 'a beautiful youth,' who introduced himself as one of the philosopher's profoundest admirers

It was from the Dulood that, one afternoon in March, he saw a storlorified by a double rainbow of extraordinary beauty; a i to his mother: here too that, in autumnal dusks, he sawrireat stars” he saw in those days of his fervid youth Browning remarked once that the romance of his life was in his own soul; and on another occasion I heard hiue assertion that in Italy only was there any romance left, ”Ah, well, I should like to include poor old Ca of his lines in ”Pippa Passes,” of the days when that enius--

”May's warhts-- Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!”

There is all the distinction between ”Pippa Passes” and ”Sordello” that there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx The latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness; but the symmetry of mere bulk is not the _symmetria prisca_ of ideal sculpture I have already alluded to ”Sordello” as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry

This, indeed, it still see suasion of certain admirers of the poe that I should eulogise it as a antic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling titan That the poem contains much which is beautiful is undeniable, also that it is surcharged insohts and a multitude of will-o'-the-wisp-like fancies which all shape towards high thinking

But it is monotonous as one of the enormous American inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whoht