Pippa Passes

“ Luigi. And such grace have they, now that the world ends!
The Python at the city, on the throne,
And brave men, God would crown for slaying him,
Lurk in bye-corners lest they fall his prey.
Are crowns yet to be won in this late time,
Which weakness makes me hesitate to reach?
’T is God’s voice calls: how could I stay? Farewell!
Talk by the way, while Pippa is passing from the Turret to the Bishop’s Brother's House, close to the Duomo S. Maria. Poor Girls sitting on the Steps.
1st Girl. There goes a swallow to Venice—the stout seafarer!
Seeing those birds fly, makes one wish for wings. ”

“ Her remorse at seeing what man she has deceived disarms his anger, and marks the dawning of a moral sense in her; and he is dismissing her gently, with all the money he can spare, when Pippa passes—singing. [21] Something in her song awakens his truer manhood. Why should he dismiss his wife? Why cast away a soul which needs him, and which he himself has called into existence? He does not cast Phene away. Her salvation and his happiness are secured.
Luigi and his mother are in the turret on the hillside above Asolo. He believes it his mission to kill the Austrian Emperor. ”

“ Art of Love.
Pippa. Peasant maid who sings in tripping through the streets on the morning of her holiday. The song reaches the windows of those who sorrow, doubt and [215] sin, and thus influences other lives than her own.—Robert Browning, Pippa Passes (1842) .
Pirate (The) , a novel by Sir W. Scott (1821) . In this novel we are introduced to the wild sea scenery of the Shetlands; the primitive manners of the old udaller, Magnus Troil, and his fair daughters Minna and Brenda ”

“ What ’s death? You ’ll love me yet!
3rd Girl [to Pippa, who approaches] . Oh, you may come closer—we shall not eat you! Why, you seem the very person that the great rich handsome Englishman has fallen so violently in love with. ”

“ The lyric bids us not ask recognition for our love: the deepest affection is the most silent. Words are a poor substitute for the silence of a long gaze and the touch which reveals the soul.
Notes.—Mushtari, the planet Jupiter (Persian) . Hudhud: fabulous bird of Solomon, according to Eastern legend: the lapwing, a well-known bird in Asia. Sitara: Persian for a star.
Pippa Passes: A Drama. (Bells and Pomegranates, No. I., 1841.) Pippa is the name of a girl employed at the silk mills at Asolo, in the Trevisan, in Northern Italy. ”

“ All of Browning's plays except Strafford and In a Balcony came out of this series. The most beautiful of them all, Pippa Passes, appeared in 1841. It is hardly a drama at all in the conventional sense, though it has one scene, that between Ottima and Sebald, of the highest dramatic power; but it has always been a favorite with readers. When it was published Miss Barrett wrote to Mr. Browning that she found it in her heart to covet the authorship of this poem more than any other of his works, and he said in answer that he, too, liked Pippa better than anything else he had yet done. Mr. ”

“ A wretched dauber, men will hoot to death
Without me, from their hooting. Oh, to hear
God’s voice plain as I heard it first, before
They broke in with their laughter! I heard them
Henceforth, not God.
Henceforth, not God. To Ancona—Greece—some isle!
I wanted silence only; there is clay
Everywhere. One may do whate’er one likes
In Art: the only thing is, to make sure
That one does like it—which takes pains to know.
Scatter all this, my Phene—this mad dream!
Who, what is Lutwyche, what Natalia’s friends,
What the whole world except our love—my own,
Own Phene? ”

“ The house of Jules, who crosses its threshold with Phene: she is silent, on which Jules begins—
Do not die, Phene! I am yours now, you
Are mine now; let fate reach me how she likes,
If you ’ll not die: so, never die! Sit here—
My work-room’s single seat. I over-lean
This length of hair and lustrous front; they turn
Like an entire flower upward: eyes, lips, last
Your chin—no, last your throat turns: ’t is their scent
Pulls down my face upon you. ”

“ Luigi. True, mother. Well for those who live through June!
Great noontides, thunder-storms, all glaring pomps
That triumph at the heels of June the god
Leading his revel through our leafy world.
Yes, Chiara will be here.
Yes, Chiara will be here.⁠Mother. In June: remember,
Yourself appointed that month for her coming.
Luigi. Was that low noise the echo?
Luigi. Was that low noise the echo?⁠Mother. The night-wind.
She must be grown—with her blue eyes upturned
As if life were one long and sweet surprise:
In June she comes.
In June she comes.⁠Luigi. ”

“ All other men and women that this earth
Belongs to, who all days alike possess,
Make general plenty cure particular dearth,
Get more joy one way, if another, less:
Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven
What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven,—
Sole light that helps me through the year, thy sun’s!
Try now! Take Asolo’s Four Happiest Ones—
And let thy morning rain on that superb
Great haughty Ottima; can rain disturb
Her Sebald’s homage? All the while thy rain
Beats fiercest on her shrub-house window-pane,
He will but press the closer, breathe more warm
Against her cheek ”

“ Fancy the thrice-sage, thrice-precautioned man
Arriving at the palace on my errand!
No, no! I have a handsome dress packed up—
White satin here, to set off my black hair;
In I shall march—for you may watch your life out
Behind thick walls, make friends there to betray you;
More than one man spoils everything. March straight—
Only, no clumsy knife to fumble for.
Take the great gate, and walk (not saunter) on
Thro’ guards and guards——I have rehearsed it all
Inside the turret here a hundred times. ”

“ Well, this Jules ... a wretched fribble—oh, I watched his disportings at Possagno, the other day! Canova’s gallery—you know: there he marches first resolvedly past great works by the dozen without vouchsafing an eye: all at once he stops full at the Psiche-fanciulla—cannot pass that old acquaintance without a nod of encouragement—“In your new place, beauty? Then behave yourself as well here as at Munich—I see you!” ”

“ Power shall fall short in or exceed!
And more of it, and more of it!—oh yes—
I will pass each, and see their happiness,
And envy none—being just as great, no doubt,
Useful to men, and dear to God, as they! ”

“ Good-bye, therefore, to poor Canova—whose gallery no longer needs detain his successor Jules, the predestinated novel thinker in marble!
5th Student. Tell him about the women: go on to the women!
1st Student. Why, on that matter he could never be supercilious enough. How should we be other (he said) than the poor devils you see, with those debasing habits we cherish? He was not to wallow in that mire, at least: he would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with the Psiche-fanciulla. ”

“ Nature or trick! I see what I have done,
Entirely now! Oh I am proud to feel
Such torments—let the world take credit thence—
I, having done my deed, pay too its price!
I hate, hate—curse you! God ’s in his heaven! ”

“ And the bride! Yes, sure enough, our Phene! Should you have known her in her clothes? How magnificently pale!
Gottlieb. She does not also take it for earnest, I hope?
1st Student. Oh, Natalia’s concern, that is! We settle with Natalia.
6th Student. She does not speak—has evidently let out no word. The only thing is, will she equally remember the rest of her lesson, and repeat correctly all those verses which are to break the secret to Jules?
Gottlieb. How he gazes on her! Pity—pity! ”

“ My glory springs from another source; or if from this, by contrast only,—for I, the bishop, am the brother of your employers, Ugo. I hope to repair some of their wrong, however; so far as my brother’s ill-gotten treasure reverts to me, I can stop the consequences of his crime: and not one soldo shall escape me. Maffeo, the sword we quiet men spurn away, you shrewd knaves pick up and commit murders with; what opportunities the virtuous forego, the villainous seize. ”

“ He still stared into the fire, and Philippa still stared at him.
A wild burst of wind shook the little hut, sending flurries of snow under the rattling door, but neither of them noticed it. A silence was poised fast between them, and hung so, growing more and more tense every moment.
The night seemed full of voices. Were they warning, menacing, mocking—or all three? The strings of Pippa's life had been tautly strung, and she recognized an urgency that pervaded the atmosphere. She was not in the least afraid of the man. She was never afraid of anything. ”

“ So, talk to me of the religion of a bishop! I have renounced all bishops save Bishop Beveridge—mean to live so—and die—As some Greek dog-sage, dead and merry, Hellward bound in Charon’s wherry, With food for both worlds, under and upper, Lupine-seed and Hecate’s supper, And never an obolus... (Though thanks to you, or this Intendant through you, or this Bishop through his Intendant—I possess a burning pocketful of zwanzigers) ...To pay the Stygian Ferry!
1st Policeman. There is the girl, then; go and deserve them the moment you have pointed out to us Signor Luigi and his mother. ”

“ As well affirm that your eye is no longer in your body, because its earliest favorite, whatever it may have first loved to look on, is dead and done with—as that any affection is lost to the soul when its first object, whatever happened first to satisfy it, is superseded in due course. Keep but ever looking, whether with the body’s eye or the mind’s, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?—there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. ”

“ Her comments on it have none of the wayward charm of her morning fancies, for Pippa is very human—she can envy and decry, swinging loose from the central steadiness of her nature like many another of us, obsessed like her by some vile happening of the hours. ”

“ WHEN PIPPA PASSED MR. DELAFIELD, stepping comfortably forth from his club, had dined especially well, and was in a correspondingly good humour. As the brisk March wind swept across the comer just in front of him, he meanwhile settling his glossy hat more firmly on a fine, close-clipped grey head, a sudden kindly impulse, not entirely usual with him, sent him bending to his knee to pick up the fugitive slip of white, scribbled foolscap that fluttered by him, hotly pursued by a slender young man. ”

“ That ’s the joke. But you should have joined us at the beginning: there’s no doubt he loves the girl—loves a model he might hire by the hour!
Gottlieb. See here! “He has been accustomed,” he writes, “to have Canova’s women about him, in stone, and the world’s women beside him, in flesh; these being as much below, as those above, his soul’s aspiration: but now he is to have the reality.” There you laugh again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth.
1st Student. Schramm! (Take the pipe out of his mouth, somebody!) Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth? ”

“ And wasps—would I be such a fool!—Oh, here!
This is my way: I answer every one
Who asks me why I make so much of him—
(If you say, “you love him”—straight “he’ll not be gulled!”)
“He that seduced me when I was a girl
Thus high—had eyes like yours, or hair like yours,
Brown, red, white,”—as the case may be: that pleases!
See how that beetle burnishes in the path!
There sparkles he along the dust: and, there—
Your journey to that maize-tuft spoiled at least! ”

“ A great deed that the world needed must be done; and the man loved the great deed, but his heart had grown faint, and he waited.
And it chanced that Pippa passed, singing, and her song reached the man; and it was to him as if God called. He rose up strong and brave, and leaping to his horse he rode away to give the great deed to the world.
At night when the tired Pippa lay upon her little bed, she said to the day, "Sweet Day, you brought me no loving deed to give in payment for the joy you gave." ”

“ Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world: look at a blossom—it drops presently, having done its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed, and where would be the blossom’s place could it continue? ”

“ And the girl told her; adding, “He's 'way up in G, and owns mines, and railroads, and yachts, and little things like that. I guess a girl more or less doesn't matter a whole heap to him!”
Pippa sat still, wondering at the wild improbabilities that color this our human life. “When we read about these things in novels and magazines,” she said to herself, “and when we see them on the stage, we say they're impossible. Yet they go on happening right along!”
For Pippa knew the man. ”

“ We are all agreed, all in a tale, observe, when Jules shall burst out on us in a fury by and by: I am spokesman—the verses that are to undeceive Jules bear my name of Lutwyche—but each professes himself alike insulted by this strutting stone-squarer, who came alone from Paris to Munich, and thence with a crowd of us to Venice and Possagno here, but proceeds in a day or two alone again—oh, alone indubitably!—to Rome and Florence. ”

“ Yet since his hand could manage a chisel, he has practised expressing other men’s Ideals; and, in the very perfection he has attained to, he foresees an ultimate failure: his unconscious hand will pursue its prescribed course of old years, and will reproduce with a fatal expertness the ancient types, let the novel one appear never so palpably to his spirit. There is but one method of escape: confiding the virgin type to as chaste a hand, he will turn painter instead of sculptor, and paint, not carve, its characteristics,”—strike out, I dare say, a school like Correggio: how think you, Ugo? ”

“ Intendant. No, nor needs be: for when I murdered your brother’s friend, Pasquale, for him...
Monsignor. Ah, he employed you in that business, did he? Well, I must let you keep, as you say, this villa and that podere, for fear the world should find out my relations were of so indifferent a stamp? Maffeo, my family is the oldest in Messina, and century after century have my progenitors gone on polluting themselves with every wickedness under heaven: my own father ... rest his soul!—I have, I know, a chapel to support that it may rest: my dear two dead brothers were,—what you know tolerably well ”