and just compassion, and the representation is lifted into imaginative strength, range and dignity of thought and feeling by her being made the image of the whole of humanity.  “This woman,” he thought, “is humanity, whom I love, who asks the poet in me to reveal her as she is, a divine seed of God to find some day its flowering—­the broken harlot of the universe, who will be, far off, the Magdalen redeemed by her ineradicable love.  That, and with every power I have, I will, as poet, love and represent.”

This is the imagination working at its best, with its most penetrative and passionate power, and Browning is far greater as a poet in this Thing of his, where thought and love are knit into union to give birth to moral, intellectual and spiritual beauty, than he is in those lighter and cleverer poems in which he sketches with a facile but too discursive a pencil, the transient moments, grave or light, of the lives of women.  Yet this and they show his range, his variety, the embracing of his sympathy.

Over against these girls in the market-place, against Ottima in her guilt, and Phene who is as yet a nonentity (her speech to the sculptor is too plainly Browning’s analysis of the moment, not her own thinking—­no girl of fourteen brought up by Natalia would talk in that fashion) is set Pippa, the light, life and love of the day, the town, the people and the poem.  She passes like an angel by and touches with her wing events and persons and changes them to good.  She has some natural genius, and is as unconscious of her genius as she is of the good she does.  In her unconsciousness is the fountain of her charm.  She lives like a flower of the field that knows not it has blest and comforted with its beauty the travellers who have passed it by.  She has only one day in the whole year for her own, and for that day she creates a fresh personality for herself.  She clothes her soul, intellect, imagination, and spiritual aspiration in holiday garments for the day, becoming for the time a new poetic self, and able to choose any other personality in Asolo from hour to hour—­the queen and spirit of the town; not wishing to be, actually, the folk she passes by, but only, since she is so isolated, to be something in their lives, to touch them for help and company.

The world of nature speaks to her and loves her.  She sees all that is beautiful, feeds on it, and grasps the matter of thought that underlies the beauty.  And so much is she at home with nature that she is able to describe with ease in words almost as noble as the thing itself the advent of the sun.  When she leaps out of her bed to meet the leap of the sun, the hymn of description she sings might be sung by the Hours themselves as they dance round the car of the god.  She can even play with the great Mother as with an equal, or like her child.  The charming gaiety with which she speaks to the sunlights that dance in her room, and to the flowers which are her sisters, prove, however isolated her life may be,