might be described as dialogues conducted by means of “asides,” and even the imagination of a reader resents a construction of scenes which requires these duets of soliloquies, these long sequences of the audible-inaudible.  With the “very tragical mirth” of the second part of Chiappino’s story of moral and political disaster, the spectators and the stage have wholly disappeared from Browning’s theatre; the imaginary dialogue is highly dramatic, in one sense of the word, and is admirable in its kind, but we transport ourselves best to the market-place of Faenza by sitting in an easy chair.

Pippa Passes is singular in its construction; scenes detached, though not wholly disconnected, are strung pendant-wise upon the gold thread, slender but sufficiently strong, of an idea; realism in art, as we now call it, hangs from a fine idealism; this substantial globe of earth with its griefs, its grossnesses, its heroism, swings suspended from the seat of God.  The idea which gives unity to the whole is not a mere fantasy.  The magic practised by the unconscious Pippa through her songs is of that genuine and beautiful kind which the Renaissance men of science named “Magia Naturalis.”  It is no fantasy but a fact that each of us influences the lives of others more or less every day, and at times in a peculiar degree, in ways of which we are not aware.  Let this fact be seized with imaginative intensity, and let the imagination render it into a symbol—­we catch sight of Pippa with her songs passing down the grass-paths and under the pine-wood of Asolo.  Her only service to God on this one holiday of a toilsome year is to be glad.  She misconceives everything that concerns “Asolo’s Four Happiest Ones”—­to her fancy Ottima is blessed with love, Jules is no victim of an envious trick, Luigi’s content in his lot is deep and unassailable, and Monsignor is a holy and beloved priest; and, unawares to her, in modes far other than she had imagined, each of her dreams comes true; even Monsignor for one moment rises into the sacred avenger of God.  Her own service, though she knows it not, is more than a mere twelve-hours’ gladness; she, the little silk-winder, rays forth the influences of a heart that has the potency ascribed to gems of unflawed purity; and such influences—­here embodied in the symbol of a song—­are among the precious realities of our life.  Nowhere in literature has the virtue of mere innocent gladness been more charmingly imagined than in her morning outbreak of expectancy, half animal glee, half spiritual joy; the “whole sunrise, not to be suppressed” is a limitless splendour, but the reflected beam cast up from the splash of her ewer and dancing on her poor ceiling is the same in kind; in the shrub-house up the hill-side are great exotic blooms, but has not Pippa her one martagon lily, over which she queens it?  With God all service ranks the same, and she shall serve Him all this long day by gaiety and gratitude.