[Footnote 14:  “Mr. Browning prepared himself for writing Sordello,” says Mrs. Orr, “by studying all the chronicles of that period of Italian history which the British Museum contained; and we may be sure that every event he alludes to as historical, is so in spirit, if not in the letter; while such details as come under the head of historical curiosities are absolutely true.  He also supplemented his reading by a visit to the places in which the scenes of the story are laid.”—­Handbook, p. 31.]

[Footnote 15:  Of all these matters, and of all else that is known of Sordello, a good and sympathetic account will be found in Mr. Eugene Benson’s little book on Sordello and Cunizza (Dent, 1903).]

5.  PIPPA PASSES.

    [Published in 1841 as No.  I of Bells and Pomegranates
    (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol.  III., pp. 1-79).]

Pippa Passes is Browning’s most perfect work, and here, more perhaps than in anything he ever wrote, he wrote to please himself.  As a whole, he has never written anything to equal it in artistic symmetry; while a single scene, that between Ottima and Sebald, reaches the highest level of tragic utterance which he has ever attained.  The plan of the work, in which there are elements of the play and elements of the masque, is a wholly original one:  a series of scenes, connected only by the passing through them of a single person, who is outside their action, and whose influence on that action is unconscious.  “Mr Browning,” says Mrs. Sutherland Orr in the Handbook, “was walking alone in a wood near Dulwich, when the image flashed upon him of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa or Pippa."[16] It is this motive that makes unity in variety, linking together a sequence of otherwise independent scenes.  The poem is the story of Pippa’s New Year’s Day holiday, her one holiday in the year.  She resolves to fancy herself to be in turn the four happiest people in Asolo, and, to realise her fancy as much as she can, she spends her day in wandering about the town, passing, in the morning, the shrub-house up the hillside, where Ottima and her lover Sebald have met; at noon, the house of Jules, over Orcana; in the evening, the turret on the hill above Asolo, where are Luigi and his mother; and at night, the palace by the Duomo, now tenanted by Monsignor the Bishop.  These, whom she imagines to be the happiest people in the town, have all, in reality, arrived at crises of tremendous and tragic importance to themselves, and, in one instance, to her.  Each stands at the turning-point of a life:  Ottima and Sebald, unrepentant, with a crime behind them; Jules and Phene, two souls brought strangely face to face by a fate which may prove their salvation or their perdition; Luigi, irresolute,