“I was so young—I loved him so—I had
No mother—God forgot me—and I fell—”
exceeds in pathetic effect any thing in English dramatic literature since the Elizabethan era.
We hardly know how to express our admiration of “Pippa Passes,” making as it does the “sense of satisfaction ache,” with its abounding beauty. In this piece the author’s nature seems for once to have become fluid, and gushes out in melodious thought and passion. Pippa herself is one of poetry’s most exquisite creations, and, among her many “passes,” those she makes into the hearts and imaginations of a thousand readers, ought not to be overlooked. The design of the play is new, and it would be difficult to state in an intellectual form the source of its charm. Its completeness is in its seeming incompleteness. The grandest scene is that between Ottima and Sebald, the fine audacity of which carries us back to the elder period of the English drama. The greatest instance of imagination in Browning’s works is contained in this scene. We give it below:
“Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead,
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burnt through the pine-tree roof—here burnt and there,
As if God’s messenger through the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,