Life of Robert Browning [40]
and simultaneously exclaims,
as she throws them rejectingly from her nervous fingers, "Three, four --
four grey hairs!" then with an almost sublime coquetry of horror
turns abruptly to Sebald, saying with a voice striving vainly to be blithe --
"Is it so you said
A plait of hair should wave across my neck?
No -- this way."
Who has not been moved by the tragic grandeur of the verse, as well as
by the dramatic intensity of the episode of the lovers' "crowning night"?
"Ottima. The day of it too, Sebald!
When heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with 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 tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged 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 more poignantly 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 same unconsidered magic.
There is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling tones,
caught up in a moment in joyous caprice, in
"Give her but a least excuse to love me!
When -- where ----"
No one of these songs, all acutely apt to the time and the occasion,
has a more overwhelming effect than that which interrupts Ottima and Sebald
at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness,
behind which is the narrow twilit backward way.
"Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow;
Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent in sin. Say that!
Sebald. I crown you
My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent . . .
[From without is heard the voice of PIPPA 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.]
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 Himmel grosser als jedes Gewoelk darin,
und dauerhafter dazu,' meditates Jean Paul: "There can be nothing good,
as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye
of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient," utters the Oriental mystic.
It is interesting to know that many of the nature touches were indirectly
as she throws them rejectingly from her nervous fingers, "Three, four --
four grey hairs!" then with an almost sublime coquetry of horror
turns abruptly to Sebald, saying with a voice striving vainly to be blithe --
"Is it so you said
A plait of hair should wave across my neck?
No -- this way."
Who has not been moved by the tragic grandeur of the verse, as well as
by the dramatic intensity of the episode of the lovers' "crowning night"?
"Ottima. The day of it too, Sebald!
When heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with 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 tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged 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 more poignantly 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 same unconsidered magic.
There is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling tones,
caught up in a moment in joyous caprice, in
"Give her but a least excuse to love me!
When -- where ----"
No one of these songs, all acutely apt to the time and the occasion,
has a more overwhelming effect than that which interrupts Ottima and Sebald
at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness,
behind which is the narrow twilit backward way.
"Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow;
Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent in sin. Say that!
Sebald. I crown you
My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent . . .
[From without is heard the voice of PIPPA 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.]
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 Himmel grosser als jedes Gewoelk darin,
und dauerhafter dazu,' meditates Jean Paul: "There can be nothing good,
as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye
of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient," utters the Oriental mystic.
It is interesting to know that many of the nature touches were indirectly