Pippa Passes is a sequence of dramatic scenes, with lyrics interspersed, and placed in a lyrical setting; the figures dark or bright, of the painting are “ringed by a flowery bowery angel-brood” of song.  But before his Bells and Pomegranates were brought to a close Browning had discovered in the short monodrama, lyrical or reflective, the most appropriate vehicle for his powers of passion and of thought.  Here a single situation sufficed; characters were seen rightly in position; the action of the piece was wholly internal; a passion could be isolated, and could be either traced through its varying moods or seized in its moment of culmination; the casuistry of the brain could be studied apart,—­it might have its say uninterrupted, or it might be suddenly encountered and dissipated by some spearlike beam of light from the heart or soul; the traditions of a great literary form were not here a cause of embarrassment; they need not, as in work for the theatre, be laboriously observed or injuriously violated; the poet might assert his independence and be wholly original.

And original, in the best sense of the word—­entirely true to his highest self—­Browning was in the “Dramatic Lyrics” of 1842, and the “Dramatic Romances and Lyrics” of 1845.  His senses were at once singularly keen and energetic, and singularly capacious of delight; his eyes were active instruments of observation, and at the same time were possessed by a kind of rapture in form—­and not least in fantastic form—­and a rapture still finer in the opulence and variety of colour.  In these poems we are caught into what may truly be called an enthusiasm of the senses; and presently we find that the senses, good for their own sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit.  Having returned from his first visit to southern Italy, the sights and sounds, striking upon the retina and the auditory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience, still attack the eye and ear as he writes his Englishman in Italy, and by virtue of their eager obsession demand and summon forth the appropriate word.[32] The fisherman from Amalfi pitches down his basket before us,

     All trembling alive
    With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit,
    —­You touch the strange lumps,
    And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner
     Of horns and of humps.

Or it is the “quick rustle-down of the quail-nets,” or the “whistling pelt” of the olives, when Scirocco is loose, that invades our ears.  And by and by among the mountains the play of the senses expands, and the soul has its great word to utter: 

     God’s own profound
    Was above me, and round me the mountains,
     And under, the sea,
    And within me, my heart to bear witness
     hat was and shall be.