the Italian and German races. Sebald, in a
sudden access of brutal rage, has killed the old doting husband, but his
conscience, too feeble to stay his hand before, is awake to torture him
after the deed. But Ottima is steadfast in evil, with the Italian
conscienceless resoluteness. She can no more feel either fear or remorse
than Clytaemnestra. The scene between Jules, the French sculptor, and his
bride Phene, and that between Luigi, the light-headed Italian patriot,
and his mother, are less great indeed, less tragic and intense and
overpowering, than this crowning episode; but they are scarcely less
fine and finished in a somewhat slighter style. Both are full of colour
and music, of insight into nature and into art, and of superb lines and
passages, such as this, which is spoken by Luigi:--

"God must be glad one loves his world so much.
I can give news of earth to all the dead
Who ask me:--last year's sunsets, and great stars
That had a right to come first and see ebb
The crimson wave that drifts the sun away--
Those crescent moons with notched and burning rims
That strengthened into sharp fire, and there stood,
Impatient of the azure--and that day
In March, a double rainbow stopped the storm--
May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights--
Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"

But in neither is there any single passage of such incomparable quality
as the thunderstorm in the first scene, a storm not to be matched in
English poetry:--

"Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned through the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger through 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."

The vivid colloquial scenes in prose have much of that pungent
semi-satirical humour of which Browning had shown the first glimpse in
_Sordello_. Besides these, there is one intermediate scene in verse, the
talk of the "poor girls" on the Duomo steps, which seems to me one of
the most pathetic things ever written by the most pathetic of
contemporary poets. It is this scene that contains the exquisite song,
"You'll love me yet."

"You'll love me yet!--and I can tarry
Your love's protract