nature can be devoid, has flashed up in one moment's reverent and perhaps remorseful regret for his departed rival. His comic crew mistake the sentiment; they stifle it by their mirth; and in the combined shock and reaction, he staggers off to Balaustion's house and 'has it out' with her and with himself. The difficulty of understanding his 'apology' does not lie in any abstruseness of its arguments, as in the case of Sordello, but in their realism. It is full of allusions to local jokes and practices and to persons concerned in them, which affect the average reader very much as the chaff of our Society papers might affect a Frenchman or German a hundred or more years hence; and the whole nature of Aristophanes is bound up in his way of bringing them in. If the conception of Sordello needs pruning down, that of the Greek poet requires all its building up, and every sentence which falls from him, in his mental writhings and plungings, is a self-revealing, whether intended or not, of the great, reckless, triumphant genius, which the voice of conscience has suddenly brought to bay.

The suggested advent of a great British poet, who will terminate the feud between tragedy and comedy, by uniting both characters in himself, loses something of its point, by being imputed to Balaustion, as the expression of a serious historic possibility; though there is no doubt that Mr. Browning was thinking of the England of the Renaissance, which was Shakespeare's England, when he made her speculate on the judgments which Greek art might provoke in some remote place, and at some distant time. The idea of a dramatist who will do what he cannot, and will not ruin himself by attempting, is flung out by

Aristophanes, at the laughing end of his defence, as a last expression of the impossible, and naturally to be connected with the least possible birthplace for such a phenomenon: 'the far-away islands where snow and mist harden into tin.' He would have been more just to Shakespeare, had he known him, than he was to Euripides; for he would have been more in sympathy with him. Euripides was an ascetic and a reformer; a man of pure life, and yet one who defended the equality of human rights; and Aristophanes hated these attributes the more because in his heart he felt rebuked by the man who owned them. But his great contemporary was, for this very reason, the true link between pagan Greece and our own Christian time, and Mr. Browning gives Balaustion a last word by consecrating him as such. The passage in which he does this disappears in Mr. Holland's arrangement, which follows the natural order of her adventure; but it forms a fitting climax to all that is pathetic in the work, as well as a brilliant antithesis to the image of repose in death, by which it is preceded :—

'He lies now in the little valley, laughed

And moaned about by those mysterious streams,

Boiling and freezing like the love and hate

Which helped or harmed him through his earthly course.
They mix in Arethousa by his grave.'

'He lives! hark, —waves say, winds sing out the same,

And yonder dares the citied ridge of Rhodes
Its headlong plunge from sky to sea, disparts

North bay from south, -each guarded calm, that guest
May enter gladly, blow what wind there will,—
Boiled round with breakers, to no other cry!

All in one choros,-what the master-word

They take up?—hark! "There are no gods, no gods!
Glory to God-who saves Euripides !"'

'Pippa Passes' belongs in some degree to this group of argumentative poems; because its various scenes all serve to illustrate an idea which is deeply rooted in Mr. Browning's mind: that of the equal significance of small with great things. It takes a religious form in the little heroine's thoughts; for she has a romantic conception of the beauty of rank and wealth; and is sure, nevertheless, that no one of their possessors is worth more in God's sight than she-and it is a religious idea with Mr. Browning himself; but he is thoroughly alive to all the mystery of practical experience which connects itself with it; and 'Pippa Passes' was written to show how slight things do the work of great ones, as well as to remind us that they do it. It is the poetic expression of this great natural truth: everything which we feel has a cause within ourselves as well as outside us; and the efficiency of the external cause depends entirely on the help it receives from the internal one. In plain English, we feel on all occasions exactly as we are in the mood to do so. There is nothing so great but that it may sometimes fail to lay hold of us; and there is also nothing so small but that it may sometimes shake us to our foundation. A whisper will find its way to a deaf ear when a shout will not; and the long ether waves which hit the eye into the sensation of red, need only be a little lengthened to pass over it altogether. If we exchange body for mind, and fixed personal conditions for varying ones, this gives us the whole philosophy of the 'word in season;' and Pippa's

songs are a word in season; or rather, she, with the suggestions of her passing presence, is the word in season herself. Neither she nor her songs might have 'said' anything to her fellow-actors in the drama a day or even an hour before the critical moment; and the bare sound of her voice might have sufficed to do the work, when once the moment had come. It smites the hearers' sense by the contrast of her fresh child's life to their own feverish and thought-laden existence; and with the shock comes a revulsion; the spell of feeling is broken, in which each in his different way was bound. She is the breath of soft air; the sound of church-bells--the sudden touch from another world-which at some time or other has transformed the life of almost everyone of us; soothing our nerves or bracing them, into remorse for wrong done, sorrow for wrong intended, the strength to do, the patience to endure. Pippa's real strength is in her unconsciousness; so also is her artistic effect, as she sings her way through the spiritual shadows which this very unconsciousness dispels; but there is also an artistic touch in the vague weariness of mind as well as fatigue of body in which she closes her day. The sun is setting darkly, and there is nothing so tiring to habitual workers as doing nothing. The weariness is fully accounted for. But our fancy irresistibly connects it with less natural things; with the invisible conflict which has been waged around her the unseen darkness which has compassed her about.

The plan of the poem is varied in the case of' Luigi,' who is startled by Pippa's songs into fresh courage for doing something wrong. But the same end is effected

though in a different way. He believes he is bracing himself to a virtuous act; and even his virtue is more likely to gain than to lose by the personal safety which his effort secures to him.

'Pippa Passes' follows immediately on 'Sordello,' in the chronological order of Mr. Browning's work; and it is interesting to note the difference of the two productions and the manner in which one supplements the other. Sordello' is the study of one poetic soul. 'Pippa Passes' is a picture of life in which every variety of character is presented to the reader's mind. 'Sordello' is written in a uniform tone of feeling. In 'Pippa Passes' we find every shade of emotion. It contains strong passion, deep tenderness, and a bright breezy humour, which keeps the atmosphere fresh, but never chills it; and this brings us to another point of interest which it is important not to overlook. The Browning of 'Pippa Passes' was older than the Browning of 'Sordello;' he had laid deeper hold on the realities of life, its contradictions and its deceptions; but he had grown neither cynical nor conventional. We feel this most strongly in the scene between the young French sculptor and the girl whom he has been entrapped into marrying. At the first moment Jules could only forgive Phene, and set her free; on second thoughts he determines to keep and to cherish her. He does not delude himself about her past, which has been everything that childish ignorance and corrupt example could make it; but he believes in the soul which the touch of his purer nature has brought to life; and he sinks that past, in which the newly-awakened moral being, the self-conscious, loved, and loving woman can