How deep a note, again, is touched when Sebald exclaims, in allusion to his murder of Luca, that he was so “wrought upon,” though here, it may be, there is an unconscious reminiscence of the tenser and more culminative cry of Othello, “but being wrought, perplext in the extreme.”  Still more profound a touch is that where Ottima, daring her lover to the “one thing that must be done; you know what thing:  Come in and help to carry,” says, with affected lightsomeness, “This dusty pane might serve for looking-glass,” and simultaneously exclaims, as she throws them rejectingly from her nervous fingers, “Three, four—­four grey hairs!” then with an almost sublime coquetry of horror turns abruptly to Sebald, saying with a voice striving vainly to be blithe—­

                              “Is it so you said
      A plait of hair should wave across my neck? 
      No—­this way.”

Who has not been moved by the tragic grandeur of the verse, as well as by the dramatic intensity of the episode of the lovers’ “crowning night”?

“Ottima.  The day of it too, Sebald!  When heaven’s pillars seemed o’erbowed with heat, Its black-blue canopy suffered descend Close on us both, to weigh down each to each, And smother up all life except our life.  So lay we till the storm came.

      Sebald.  How it came!

Ottima.  Buried in woods we lay, you recollect; Swift ran the searching tempest overhead; And ever and anon some bright white shaft Burned thro’ the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, As if God’s messenger thro’ the close wood screen Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, Feeling for guilty thee and me:  then broke The thunder like a whole sea overhead ——­”

Surely there is nothing in all our literature more poignantly dramatic than this first part of “Pippa Passes.”  The strains which Pippa sings here and throughout are as pathetically fresh and free as a thrush’s song in the heart of a beleaguered city, and as with the same unconsidered magic.  There is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling tones, caught up in a moment in joyous caprice, in

     “Give her but a least excuse to love me! 
      When—­where——­”

No one of these songs, all acutely apt to the time and the occasion, has a more overwhelming effect than that which interrupts Ottima and Sebald at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness, behind which is the narrow twilit backward way.

“Ottima.  Bind it thrice about my brow;
Crown me your queen, your spirit’s arbitress,
Magnificent in sin.  Say that!

Sebald.  I crown you
My great white queen, my spirit’s arbitress,
Magnificent..

[From without is heard the voice of PIPPA singing—­]

The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn: 
God’s in his heaven—­
All’s right with the world! [PIPPA passes,