Again, there are few studies in literature of contempt, hatred and revenge more sustained and subtle than Browning’s poem entitled A Forgiveness; and the title marks how, though the justice of revenge was accomplished on the woman, yet that pity, even love for her, accompanied and followed the revenge.  Our natural revolt against the cold-blooded work of hatred is modified, when we see the man’s heart and the woman’s soul, into pity for their fate.  The man tells his story to a monk in the confessional, who has been the lover of his wife.  He is a statesman absorbed in his work, yet he feels that his wife makes his home a heaven, and he carries her presence with him all the day.  His wife takes the first lover she meets, and, discovered, tells her husband that she hates him.  “Kill me now,” she cries.  But he despises her too much to hate her; she is not worth killing.  Three years they live together in that fashion, till one evening she tells him the truth.  “I was jealous of your work.  I took my revenge by taking a lover, but I loved you, you only, all the time, and lost you—­

                I thought you gave
    Your heart and soul away from me to slave
    At statecraft.  Since my right in you seemed lost,
    I stung myself to teach you, to your cost,
    What you rejected could be prized beyond
    Life, heaven, by the first fool I threw a fond
    Look on, a fatal word to.

“Ah, is that true, you loved and still love?  Then contempt perishes, and hate takes its place.  Write your confession, and die by my hand.  Vengeance is foreign to contempt, you have risen to the level at which hate can act.  I pardon you, for as I slay hate departs—­and now, sir,” and he turns to the monk—­

                She sleeps, as erst
    Beloved, in this your church:  ay, yours!

and drives the poisoned dagger through the grate of the confessional into the heart of her lover.

This is Browning’s closest study of hate, contempt, and revenge.  But bitter and close as it is, what is left with us is pity for humanity, pity for the woman, pity for the lover, pity for the husband.

Again, in the case of Sebald and Ottima in Pippa Passes, pity also rules.  Love passing into lust has led to hate, and these two have slaked their hate and murdered Luca, Ottima’s husband.  They lean out of the window of the shrub-house as the morning breaks.  For the moment their false love is supreme.  Their crime only creeps like a snake, half asleep, about the bottom of their hearts; they recall their early passion and try to brazen it forth in the face of their murder, which now rises, dreadful and more dreadful, into threatening life in their soul.  They reanimate their hate of Luca to lower their remorse, but at every instant his blood stains their speech.  At last, while Ottima loves on, Sebald’s dark horror turns to hatred of her he loved, till she lures him back into desire of her again.  The momentary lust cannot last, but Browning shoots it into prominence that the outburst of horror and repentance may be the greater.