of dancers.  The love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as the love of those whom we do know.  In our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost.  And this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world scattering goodness like a capricious god.  It is desired that mankind should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a criminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded Christ.  Browning, like every one else, when awakened to the beauty and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement.  He has written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies of others to mightier and better issues.  Then his almost faultless artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of anything but her own happiness, and should sway men’s lives with a lonely mirth.  It was a bold and moving conception to show us these mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping upon the solitude of a child.  And it was an even more precise instinct which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman.  A man’s good work is effected by doing what he does, a woman’s by being what she is.

There is one other point about Pippa Passes which is worth a moment’s attention.  The great difficulty with regard to the understanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance, scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary artist.  His adversaries consider his literary vagaries a disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays.  Browning is supposed to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of thought.  But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will take Browning’s literary form seriously, he took his own literary form very seriously.  Now Pippa Passes is, among other things, eminently remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnected but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one figure.  For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the laudations of his “mind” and his “message,” has scarcely ever had credit.  And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary mistakes.  There is one of them, a glaring one, in Pippa Passes; and, as far as I know, no critic has ever thought