Sebald.  God’s in his heaven!  Do you hear that? 
Who spoke?”

This sweet voice of Pippa reaches the guilty lovers, reaches Luigi in his tower, hesitating between love and patriotic duty, reaches Jules and Phene when all the happiness of their unborn years trembles in the balance, reaches the Prince of the Church just when his conscience is sore beset by a seductive temptation, reaches one and all at a crucial moment in the life of each.  The ethical lesson of the whole poem is summed up in

     “All service ranks the same with God—­
      With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
      Are we:  there is no last nor first,”

and in

     “God’s in his heaven—­
      All’s right with the world!”

“With God there is no lust of Godhood,” says Rossetti in “Hand and Soul”:  Und so ist der blaue Himmel grosser als jedes Gewoelk darin, und dauerhafter dazu, meditates Jean Paul:  “There can be nothing good, as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient,” utters the Oriental mystic.

It is interesting to know that many of the nature touches were indirectly due to the poet’s solitary rambles, by dawn, sundown, and “dewy eve,” in the wooded districts south of Dulwich, at Hatcham, and upon Wimbledon Common, whither he was often wont to wander and to ramble for hours, and where he composed one day the well-known lines upon Shelley, with many another unrecorded impulse of song.  Here, too, it was, that Carlyle, riding for exercise, was stopped by ’a beautiful youth,’ who introduced himself as one of the philosopher’s profoundest admirers.

It was from the Dulwich wood that, one afternoon in March, he saw a storm glorified by a double rainbow of extraordinary beauty; a memorable vision, recorded in an utterance of Luigi to his mother:  here too that, in autumnal dusks, he saw many a crescent moon with “notched and burning rim.”  He never forgot the bygone “sunsets and great stars” he saw in those days of his fervid youth.  Browning remarked once that the romance of his life was in his own soul; and on another occasion I heard him smilingly add, to some one’s vague assertion that in Italy only was there any romance left, “Ah, well, I should like to include poor old Camberwell!” Perhaps he was thinking of his lines in “Pippa Passes,” of the days when that masterpiece came ebullient from the fount of his genius—­

     “May’s warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights—­
      Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!”

There is all the distinction between “Pippa Passes” and “Sordello” that there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx.  The latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness; but the symmetry of mere bulk is not the symmetria prisca of ideal sculpture.  I have already alluded to “Sordello” as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry.  This, indeed,