Chapter 3

"I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!This way? Will you forgive me—be once moreMy great queen?"

Glorious in her victory, she demands that the hair which she had loosed in the moment of recalling their wild joys he now shall bind thrice about her brow—

"Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,Magnificent in sin. Say that!"

So she bids him; so he crowns her—

"My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,Magnificent . . ."

—but ere the exacted phrase is said, there sounds without the voice of a girl singing.

"The year's at the spring,And day's at the morn;Morning'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.)* * * * *

"The year's at the spring,And day's at the morn;Morning'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.)

* * * * *

Like her own lark on the wing, she has dropped this song to earth, unknowing and unheeding where its beauty shall alight; it is the impulse of her glad sweet heart to carol out its joy—no more. She is passing the great house of the First Happy One, so soon rejected in her game of make-believe! If now she could know what part the dream-Pippa might have taken on herself. . . . But she does not know, and, lingering for a moment by the step, she bends to pick a pansy-blossom.

The pair in the shrub-house have been arrested in full tide of passion by her song. It strikes on Sebald with the force of a warning from above—

"God's in his heaven! Do you hear that? Who spoke?You, you spoke!"—

but she, contemptuously—

". . . Oh, that little ragged girl!She must have rested on the step: we give themBut this one holiday the whole year round.Did you ever see our silk-mills—their inside?There are ten silk-mills now belong to you!"

Enervated by the interruption, she calls sharply to the singer to be quiet—but Pippa does not hear, and Ottima then orders Sebald to call, forhisvoice will be sure to carry.

No: her hour is past. He is ruled now by that voice from heaven. Terribly he turns upon her—

"Go, get your clothes on—dress those shoulders!. . . Wipe off that paint! I hate you"—

and as she flashes back her "Miserable!" his hideous repulse sinks to a yet more hideous contemplation of her—

"My God, and she is emptied of it now!Outright now!—how miraculously goneAll of the grace—had she not strange grace once?Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes,No purpose holds the features up together,Only the cloven brow and puckered chinStay in their places: and the very hairThat seemed to have a sort of life in it,Drops, a dead web!"

Poignant in its authenticity is her sole, piteous answer—

". . . Speak to me—not of me!"

But he relentlessly pursues the dread analysis of baffled passion's aspect—

"That round great full-orbed face, where not an angleBroke the delicious indolence—all broken!"

Once more that cry breaks from her—

"To me—not of me!"

but soon the natural anger against his insolence possesses her; she whelms him with a torrent of recrimination. Coward and ingrate he is, beggar, her slave—

". . . a fawning, cringing lie,A lie that walks and eats and drinks!"

—while he, as in some horrible trance, continues his cold dissection—

". . . My God!Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades—I should have known there was no blood beneath!"

For though the heaven-song have pierced him, not yet is Sebald reborn, not yet can aught of generosity involve him. Still he speaks "of her, not to her," deaf in the old selfishness and baseness. He can cry, amid his vivid recognition of another's guilt, that "the little peasant's voice has righted all again"—can be sure thatheknows "which is better, vice or virtue, purity or lust, nature or trick," and in the high nobility of such repentance as flings the worst of blame upon the other one, will grant himself lost, it is true, but "proud to feel suchtorments," to "pay the price of his deed" (ready with phrases now, he also!), as, poor weakling, he stabs himself, leaving his final word to her who had been for him all that she as yet knew how to be, in—

"I hate, hate—curse you! God's in his heaven!"* * * * *

"I hate, hate—curse you! God's in his heaven!"

* * * * *

Now, at this crisis, we are fully shown what, in despite of other commentators,[49:1]I am convinced that Browning meant us to perceive from the first—that Ottima's is the nobler spirit of the two. Her lover has stabbed himself, but she, not yet realising it, flings herself upon him, wrests the dagger—

". . . Me!Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself—kill me!Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me—thenYourself—then—presently—first hear me speak!I always meant to kill myself—wait, you!Lean on my breast—not as a breast; don't love meThe more because you lean on me, my ownHeart's Sebald!There, there, both deaths presently!"* * * * *

* * * * *

Here at last is the whole woman. "Lean on my breast—not as a breast"; "Mine is the whole crime"; "I always meant to kill myself—wait, you!" She will relinquish even her sense of womanhood; no word of blame for him; she would die, that he might live forgetting her, but it is too latefor that, so "There, there, both deaths presently." . . . And now let us read again the lamentable dying words of Sebald. It is even more than I have said: not only are we meant to understand that Ottima's is the nobler spirit, but (I think) that not alone the passing of Pippa with her song has drawn this wealth of beauty from the broken woman's soul. Always it was there; it needed but the loved one's need to pour itself before him. "There, there, both deaths presently"—and in the dying, each is again revealed. He, all self—

"Mybrain is drowned now—quite drowned: allIfeel"

—and so on; while her sole utterance is—

"Not me—to him, O God, be merciful!"

Pippa's song has, doubtlessly, saved them both, but Sebald as by direct intervention, Ottima as by the revelation of her truest self. Again, and yet again and again, we shall find in Browning this passion for "the courage of the deed"; and we shall find that courage oftenest assigned to women. For him, it was wellnigh the cardinal virtue to be brave—not always, as in Ottima, by the help of a native callousness, but assuredly always, as in her and in the far dearer women, by the help of an instinctive love for truth—

"Truth is the strong thing—let man's life be true!"

Ottima's and Sebald's lives have not been "true"; but she, who can accept the retribution and feel nofaintest impulse to blame and wound her lover—shecan rise, must rise, to heights forbidden the lame wings of him who, in his anguish, can turn and strike the fellow-creature who has but partnered him in sin. Only Pippa, passing, could in that hour save Sebald; but by the tenderness which underlay her fierce and lustful passion, and which, in any later relation, some other need of the man must infallibly have called forth, Ottima would, I believe, without Pippa have saved herself.Direct intervention: not every soul needs that. And—whether it be intentional or not, I feel unable to decide, nor does it lose, but rather gain, in interest, if it be unintentional—one of the most remarkable things in this remarkable artistic experiment, this drama in which the scenes "have in common only the appearance of one figure," is that by each of the Four Passings of Pippa, a man's is the soul rescued.

A group of art-students is assembled at Orcana, opposite the house of Jules, a young French sculptor, who to-day at noon brings home his bride—that second Happiest One, the pale and shrouded beauty whom Pippa had seen alight at Asolo, and had envied for her immaculate girlhood. Very eagerly the youths are awaiting this arrival; there are seven, including Schramm, the pipe-smoking mystic, and Gottlieb, a new-comer to the group, who hears thereason for their excitement, and tender-hearted and imaginative as he is, provides the human element amid the theorising of Schramm, the flippancy of most of the rest, and the fiendish malice of the painter, Lutwyche, who has a grudge against Jules, because Jules (he has been told) had described him and his intimates as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Very soon after the bridal pair shall have alighted and gone in (so Lutwyche tells Gottlieb), something remarkable will happen; it is this which they are awaiting—Lutwyche, as the moving spirit, close under the window of the studio, that he may lose no word of the anticipated drama. But they must all keep well within call; everybody may be needed.

At noon the married pair arrive—the bridegroom radiant, his hair "half in storm and half in calm—patted down over the left temple—like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it; and the same old blouse that he murders the marble in."[52:1]The bride is—"how magnificently pale!" Most of these young men have seen her before, and always it has been her pallor which has struck them, as it struck Pippa on seeing her alight at Asolo. She is a Greek girl from Malamocco,[52:2]fourteen years old at most, "white and quiet as an apparition," with "hair like sea-moss"; her name is Phene, which, as Lutwyche explains, means sea-eagle. . . . "How magnificentlypale"—and how Jules gazes on her! To Gottlieb that gaze of the young, rapturous husband is torture. "Pity—pity!" he exclaims—but he alone of them all is moved to this: Schramm, ever ready with his theories of mysticism and beauty and the immortal idealism of the soul, is unconcerned with practice—theories and his pipe bound all for Schramm; while Lutwyche is close-set as any predatory beast upon his prey; and the rank and file are but the foolish, heartless boys of all time, all place, the "students," mere and transient, who may turn into decent men as they grow older.

Well, they pass in, the bridegroom and his snowflake bride, and we pass in with them—but not, like them, forget the group that lurked and loitered about the house as they arrived.

The girl is silent as she is pale, and she is so pale that the first words her husband speaks are as the utterance of a fear awakened by her aspect—

"Do not die, Phene! I am yours now, youAre mine now; let fate reach me how she likes,If you'll not die: so, never die!"

He leads her to the one seat in his workroom, then bends over her in worshipping love, while she, still speechless, lifts her white face slowly to him. He lays his own upon it for an instant, then draws back to gaze again, while she still looks into his eyes,until he feels that her soul is drawing his to such communion that—

". . . I couldChange into you, beloved! You by me,And I by you; this is your hand in mine,And side by side we sit: all's true. Thank God!"

But her silence is unbroken, and now he needs her voice—

"I have spoken: speak you!"

—yet though he thus claims her utterance, his own bliss drives him onward in eager speech. "O my life to come"—the life with her . . . and yet, how shall he work!

"Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth—The live truth, passing and re-passing me,Sitting beside me?"

Still she is silent; he cries again "Now speak!"—but in a new access of joy accepts again that silence, for she must see the hiding-place he had contrived for her letters—in the fold of his Psyche's robe, "next her skin"; and now, which of them all will drop out first?

"Ah—this that swam down like a first moonbeamInto my world!"

In his gladness he turns to her with that first treasure in his hand. She is not looking. . . . But there is nothing strange in that—all the rest is newto her; naturally she is more interested in the new things, and adoringly he watches her as—

". . . Again those eyes completeTheir melancholy survey, sweet and slow,Of all my room holds; to return and restOn me, with pity, yet some wonder too . . ."

But pity and wonder are natural in her—is she not an angel from heaven? Yet he would bring her a little closer to the earth she now inhabits; so—

"What gaze you at? Those? Books I told you of;Let your first word to me rejoice them too."

Eagerly he displays them, but soon reproves himself: he has shown first a tiny Greek volume, and of course Homer's should be the Greek—

"First breathed me from the lips of my Greek girl!"

So out comes the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon their search." Well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must be—andtheywill surely bring the word he increasingly longs for. That of the "Almaign Kaiser," one day to be cast in bronze, is not worth lingering at in its present stage, but this—this? She will recognise this of Hippolyta—

"Naked upon her bright Numidian horse,"

for this is an imagined likeness, before he saw her, of herself. But no, it is unrecognised; so theymove to the next, which she cannot mistake, for was it not done by her command? She had said he was to carve, against she came, this Greek, "feasting in Athens, as our fashion was," and she had given him many details, and he had laboured ardently to express her thought. . . . But still no word from her—no least, least word; and, tenderly, at last he reproaches her—

"But you must say a 'well' to that—say 'well'!"

—for alarm is growing in him, though he strives to think it only fantasy; she gazes too like his marble, she is too like marble in her silence—marble is indeed to him his "very life's-stuff," but now he has found "the real flesh Phene . . ." and as he rhapsodises a while, hardly able to sever this breathing vision from the wonders of his glowing stone, he turns to her afresh and beholds her whiter than before, her eyes more wide and dark, and the first fear seizes him again—

"Ah, you will die—I knew that you would die!"—

and after that, there falls a long silence.

Then she speaks. "Now the end's coming"—that is what she says for her first bridal words.

"Now the end's coming: to be sure it mustHave ended some time!"

—and while he listens in the silence dreadfully transferred from her to him, the tale of Lutwyche's revenge is told at last.

We know it before Phene speaks, for Lutwyche, telling Gottlieb, has told us; but Jules must glean it from her puzzled, broken utterance, filled with allusions that mean nothing until semi-comprehension comes through the sighs of tortured soul and heart from her who still is, as it were, in a trance. And this dream-like state causes her, now and then, to say the wrong words—the wordshespoke—instead of those which had "cost such pains to learn . . ."

This is the story she tries to tell. Lutwyche had hated Jules for long. There were many reasons, but the chief was that reported judgment of the "crowd of us," as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Greatly, and above all else, had Jules despised their dissoluteness: how could they be other than the poor devils they were, with those debasing habits which they cherished? "He could never," had said Lutwyche to Gottlieb, "be supercilious enough on that matter. . . .Hewas not to wallow in the mire:hewould wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with statuary." So Lutwyche had resolved that precisely "on that matter" should his malice concentrate. He happened to hear of a young Greek girl at Malamocco, "white and quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest." She was said to be a daughter of the "hag Natalia"—said, that is, by the hag herself to be so, but Natalia was, in plain words, a procuress. "We selected," said Lutwyche, "this girlas the heroine of our jest"; and he and his gang set to work at once. Jules received, first, a mysterious perfumed letter from somebody who had seen his work at the Academy and profoundly admired it: she would make herself known to him ere long. . . . "Paolina, my little friend of the Fenice," who could transcribe divinely, had copied this letter—"the first moonbeam!"—for Lutwyche; and she copied many more for him, the letters which Psyche, at the studio, was to keep in the fold of her robe.

In his very earliest answer, Jules had proposed marriage to the unknown writer. . . . How they had laughed! But Gottlieb, hearing, could not laugh. "I say," cried he, "you wipe off the very dew of his youth." Schramm, however, had had his pipe forcibly taken from his mouth, and then had pronounced that "nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world"; so, Gottlieb silenced, Lutwyche went on with the story. The letters had gone to Jules, and the answers had come from him, two, three times a day; Lutwyche himself had concocted nearly all the mysterious lady's, which had said she was in thrall to relatives, that secrecy must be observed—in short, that Jules must wed her on trust, and only speak to her when they were indissolubly united.

But that, when accomplished, was not the whole of Lutwyche's revenge, nor of his activity. To get the full savour of his malice, the victim must be undeceived in such a way that there could be nomistaking the hand which had struck; and this could best be achieved by writing a copy of verses which should reveal their author at the end. Nor should these be given Phene to hand Jules, for so Lutwyche would lose the delicious actual instant of the revelation. No; they should be taught her, line by line and word by word (since she could not read), and taught her by the hag Natalia, that not a subtle pang be spared the "strutting stone-squarer." Thus, listening beneath the window, Lutwyche could enjoy each word, each moan, and when Jules should burst out on them in a fury (but he must not be suffered to hurt his bride: she was too valuable a model), they would all declare, with one voice, that this was their revenge for his insults, they would shout their great shout of laughter; and, next day, Jules would depart alone—"oh, alone indubitably!"—for Rome and Florence, and they would be quits with him and his "coxcombry."

That is the plan, but Phene does not know it. All she knows is that Natalia said that harm would come unless she spoke their lesson to the end. Yet, despite this threat, when Jules has fallen silent in his terror at her "whitening cheek and still dilating eyes," she feels at first that that foolish speech need not be spoken. She has forgotten half of it; she does not care now for Natalia or any of them; above all, she wants to stay where Jules' voice has lifted her, by just letting it go on. "But can it?"she asks piteously—for with that transferring of silence a change had come; the music once let fall, even Jules does not seem able to take up its life again—"no, or you would!" . . . So trust, we see, is born in her: if Jules could do what she desires, Phene knows he would. But since he cannot, they'll stay as they are—"above the world."

"Oh, you—what are you?" cries the child, who never till to-day has heard such words or seen such looks as his. But she has heard other words, seen other looks—

"The same smile girls like me are used to bear,But never men, men cannot stoop so low . . ."

Yet, watching those friends of Jules who came with the lesson she was to learn, the strangest thing of all had been to see how, speaking of him, they had usedthatsmile—

"But still Natalia said they were your friends,And they assented though they smiled the more,And all came round me—that thin EnglishmanWith light lank hair, seemed leader of the rest;He held a paper"

—and from that paper he read what Phene had got by heart.

But oh, if she need not say it! if she could look up for ever to those eyes, as now Jules lets her!

". . . I believe all sin,All memory of wrong done, suffering borne,Would drop down, low and lower, to the earthWhence all that's low comes, and there touch and stay—Never to overtake the rest of me,All that, unspotted, reaches up to you,Drawn by those eyes!"

But even as she gazes, she sees that the eyes "are altering—altered!" She knows not why, she never has understood this sudden, wondrous happening of her marriage, but the eyes to which she trusts are altering—altered—and what can she do? . . . With heartrending pathos, what she does is to clutch at his words to her, the music which had lifted her, and now perhaps will lift him too by its mere sound. "I love you, love" . . . but what does love mean? She knows not, and her "music" is but ignorant echo; if she did know, she could prevent this change, but the change is not prevented, so it cannot have been just the words—it must have been in the tone that his power lay to lift her, andthatshe cannot find, not understanding. So in the desperate need to see and hear him as he was at first, she turns to her last device—

". . . Or stay! I will repeatTheir speech, if that contents you. Only changeNo more"—

and thus to him, but half aware as yet, sure only that she is not the dream-lady from afar, Phene speaks the words that Lutwyche wrote, and now waits outside to hear.

"I am a painter who cannot paint;In my life, a devil rather than saint;In my brain, as poor a creature too;No end to all I cannot do!Yet do one thing at least I can—Love a man or hate a manSupremely: thus my lore began . . ."

The timid voice goes on, saying the lines by rote as Phene had learned them—and hard indeed they must have been to learn! For, as Lutwyche had told his friends, it must be "something slow, involved, and mystical," it must hold Jules long in doubt, and lure him on until at innermost—

"Where he seeks sweetness' soul, he may find—this!"

And truly it is so "involved," that, in the lessons at Natalia's, it had been thought well to tutor Phene in the probable interruptions from her audience of one. There was an allusion to "the peerless bride with her black eyes," andhereJules was almost certain to break in, saying that assuredly the bride was Phene herself, and so, could she not tell him what it all meant?

"And I am to go on without a word."

She goes on—on to the analysis, utterly incomprehensible to her, of Lutwyche's plan for intertwining love and hate; and with every word the malice deepens, becomes directer in its address. If any one should ask this painter who can hate supremely,howhis hate can "grin through Love's rose-braidedmask," andhow, hating another and having sought, long and painfully, to reach his victim's heart and pierce to the quick of it, he might chance to have succeeded in that aim—

"Ask this, my Jules, and be answered straight,By thy bride—how the painter Lutwyche can hate!"* * * * *

"Ask this, my Jules, and be answered straight,By thy bride—how the painter Lutwyche can hate!"

* * * * *

Phene has said her lesson, but it too has failed. He still is changed. He is not even thinking of her as she ceases. The name upon his lips is Lutwyche, not her own. He mutters of "Lutwyche" and "all of them," and "Venice"; yes, them he will meet at Venice, and it will be their turn. But with that word—"meet"—he remembers her; he speaks to her—

". . . You I shall not meet:If I dreamed, saying this would wake me."

Now Phene is again the silent one. We figure to ourselves the dark bent head, the eyes that dare no more look up, the dreadful acquiescence as he gives her money. So many others had done that; she had not thoughthewould, but she has never understood, and if to give her money is his pleasure—why, she must take it, as she had taken that of the others. But he goes on. He speaks of selling all his casts and books and medals, that the produce may keep her "out of Natalia's clutches"; and if he survives the meeting with the gang inVenice, there is just one hope, for dimly she hears him say—

"We might meet somewhere, since the world is wide . . ."

Just that one vague, far hope, and for herhowwide the world is, how very hard to compass! But she stands silent, in her well-learnt patience; and he is about to speak again, when suddenly from outside a girl's voice is heard, singing.

"Give her but a least excuse to love me!When—where—How—can this arm establish her above me,If fortune fixed her as my lady there,There already, to eternally reprove me?"

It is the song the peasants sing of "Kate the Queen"[64:1]and the page who loved her, and pined "for the grace of her so far above his power of doing good to"—

"'She never could be wronged, be poor,' he sighed,'Need him to help her!' . . ."

Pippa, going back towards Asolo, carols it out as she passes; and Jules listens to the end. It was bitter for the page to know that his lady was above all need of him; yet men are wont to love so. But why should they always choose the page's part?Hehad not, in his dreams of love. . . . And all atonce, as he vaguely ponders the song, the deep mysterious import of its sounding in this hour dawns on him.

"Here is a woman with utter need of me—I find myself queen here, it seems! How strange!"

He turns and looks again at the white, quiet child who stands awaiting her dismissal. Her soul is on her silent lips—

"Look at the woman here with the new soul . . .This new soul is mine!"

And then, musing aloud, he comes upon the truth of it—

"Scatter all this, my Phene—this mad dream!What's the whole world except our love, my own!"

To-night (he told her so, did he not?), aye, even before to-night, they will travel for her land, "some isle with the sea's silence on it"; but first he must break up these paltry attempts of his, that he may begin art, as well as life, afresh. . . .

"Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!* * * * *And you are ever by me while I gaze,—Are in my arms as now—as now—as now!Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!"

"Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!

* * * * *

And you are ever by me while I gaze,—Are in my arms as now—as now—as now!Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!"

That is what Lutwyche, under the window, hears for his revenge.

In this Passing of Pippa, silence and song have met and mingled into one another, for Phene is silence, as Pippa is song. Phene will speak more when Jules and she are in their isle together—but never will she speak much: sheissilence. Her need of him indeed was utter—she had no soul until he touched her into life: it is the very Pygmalion and Galatea. But Jules' soul, no less, had needed Pippa's song to waken to its truest self: once more the man is the one moved by the direct intervention. Not that Phene, like Ottima, could have saved herself; therewasno self to save—she had that awful, piercing selflessness of the used flesh and ignored soul. If Pippa had not passed, if Jules had gone, leaving money in her hand . . . I think that Phene would have killed herself—like Ottima, yet how unlike! For Phene (but one step upon the way) would have died for her own self's sake only, because till now she had never known it, but in that strangest, dreadfullest, that least, most, sacred of offerings-up, had "lived for others"—the others of the smile which girls like her are used to bear,

"But never men, men cannot stoop so low."

Were ever scorn and irony more blasting, was ever pity more profound, than in that line which Browning sets in the mouth of silence?

Our interest now centres again upon Pippa—partly because the Evening and Night episodes are little touched by other feminine influence, but also (and far more significantly) because the dramatic aspect of the work here loses nearly all of its peculiar beauty. The story, till now so slight yet so consummately sufficient, henceforth is involved with "plot"—that natural enemy of spontaneity and unity, and here most eminently successful in blighting both. Indeed, the lovely simplicity of the earlier plan seems actually to aid the foe in the work of destruction, by cutting, as it were, the poem into two or even three divisions: first, the purely lyric portions—those at the beginning and the end—where Pippa is alone in her room; second, the Morning and Noon episodes, where the dramas are absolutely unconnected with the passing girl; third, these Evening and Night scenes, where, on the contrary, all is forced into more or less direct relation with the little figure whose most exquisite magic has hitherto resided in the fusion of her complete personal loneliness with her potent influence upon the lives and characters of those who hear her sing.

Mr. Chesterton claims to have been the first to point out "this gross falsification of the whole beauty ofPippa Passes"—a glaring instance, as he says, ofthe definite literary blunders which Browning could make. But though that searching criticism were earliest in declaring this, I think that few of us can have read the poem without being vaguely and discomfortably aware of it. From the moment of the direct introduction of Bluphocks[68:1](whose very name, with its dull and pointless punning, is an offence), that sense of over-ingenuity, of "tiresomeness," which is the prime stumbling-block to whole-hearted Browning worship, becomes perceptible, and acts increasingly upon our nerves until the Day is over, and Pippa re-enters her "large, mean, airy chamber."

On her return to Asolo from Orcana, she passes the ruined turret wherein Luigi and his mother—those Third Happiest Ones whom in her thoughts she had not been able to separate—are wont to talk at evening. Some of the Austrian police are loitering near, and with them is an Englishman, "lusty, blue-eyed, florid-complexioned"—one Bluphocks, who is on the watch in a double capacity. He is to point out Luigi to the police, in whose pay he is, and to make acquaintance with Pippa in return for money already given by a private employer—for Bluphocks is the creature of anyone's purse.

As Pippa reaches the turret, a thought of dayslong, long before it fell to ruin makes her choose from her store of songs that which tells how—

"A king lived long ago,In the morning of the worldWhen earth was nigher heaven than now;"

and coming to be very old, was so serene in his sleepy mood, "so safe from all decrepitude," and so beloved of the gods—

"That, having lived thus long, there seemedNo need the king should ever die."

Her clear note penetrates to the spot where Luigi and his mother are talking, as so often before. He is bound this night for Vienna, there to kill the hated Emperor of Austria, who holds his Italy in thrall; for Luigi is a Carbonarist, and has been chosen for this "lesser task" by his leaders. His mother is urging him not to go. First she had tried the direct appeal, but this had failed; then argument, but this failed too; and as she stood at end of her own resources, the one hope that remained was her son's delight in living—that sense of the beauty and glory of the world which was so strong in him that he felt

"God must be glad one loves his world so much."

This joy breaks out at each turn of the mother's discourse. While Luigi is striving to make plain to her the "grounds for killing," he thinks to hear the cuckoo, and forgets all his array of facts;for April and June are coming! The mother seizes at once on this, and joins to it a still more powerful persuasion. In June, not only summer's loveliness, but Chiara, the girl he is to marry, is coming: she who gazes at the stars as he does—and how her blue eyes lift to them

"As if life were one long and sweet surprise!"

In June she comes—and with the reiteration, Luigi falters, for he recollects that in this June they were to see together "the Titian at Treviso." . . . His mother has almost won, when a "low noise" outside, which Luigi has first mistaken for the cuckoo, next for the renowned echo in the turret . . . that low noise is heard again—"the voice of Pippa, singing."

And, listening to the song which tells what kings were in the morning of the world, Luigi cries—

"No need that sort of king should ever die!"

And she begins again—

"Among the rocks his city was:Before his palace, in the sun,He sat to see his people pass,And judge them every one"

—and as she tells the manner of his judging, Luigi again exclaims:

"That king should still judge, sitting in the sun!"

But the song goes on—

"His councillors, to left and right,Looked anxious up—but no surpriseDisturbed the king's old smiling eyes,Where the very blue had turned to white";

and those eyes kept their tranquillity even when, as legend tells, a Python one day "scared the breathless city," but coming, "with forked tongue and eyes on flame," to where the king sat, and seeing the sweet venerable goodness of him, did not dare

"Approach that threshold in the sun,Assault the old king smiling there . . .Such grace had kings when the world begun!""And such grace have they, now that the world ends!"

"Approach that threshold in the sun,Assault the old king smiling there . . .Such grace had kings when the world begun!"

"And such grace have they, now that the world ends!"

cries Luigi bitterly, for at Vienna the Pythonisthe king, and brave men lurk in corners "lest they fall his prey." . . . He hesitates no more—

"'Tis God's voice calls: how could I stay? Farewell!"

and rushes from the turret, resolute for Vienna.

By going he escapes the police, for it had been decided that if he stayed at Asolo that night he should be arrested at once. He still may lose his life, for he will try to kill the Emperor; but he will then have been true to his deepest convictions—and thus Pippa's passing, Pippa's song, have for the third time helped a soul to know itself.

Unwitting as before, she goes on to the house near the Duomo Santa Maria, where the FourthHappiest One, the Monsignor of her final choice, "that holy and beloved priest," is to stay to-night. And now, for the first time, we are to see her, though only for the barest instant, come into actual contact with some fellow-creatures.

Four "poor girls" are sitting on the steps of the Santa Maria. We hear them talk with one another before Pippa reaches them: they are playing a "wishing game," originated by one who, watching the swallows fly towards Venice, yearns for their wings. She is not long from the country; her dreams are still of new milk and apples, and

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