pon passion, is
communicated through an unconscious glance or a song. For one who
believed as fixedly as Browning in the power of these moments to change
the prevailing bias of character and conduct, such a conception was full
of implicit drama. A chance inspiration led him to attempt to show how
a lyric soul flinging its soul-seed unconsciously forth in song might
become the involuntary _deus ex machina_ in the tangle of passion and
plot through which she moved, resolving its problems and averting its
catastrophes.

The result was a poem which Elizabeth Barrett "could find it in her
heart to envy" its author, which Browning himself (in 1845) liked better
than anything else he had yet done.[17] It has won a not less secure
place in the affections of all who care for Browning at all. It was
while walking alone in a wood near Dulwich, we are told by Mrs Orr, that
"the idea flashed upon him of some one walking thus 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."[18]
The most important effect of this design was to call out Browning's
considerable powers of rendering those gross, lurid, unspiritualised
elements of the human drama upon which Pippa was to flash her
transforming spell. His somewhat burly jocosity had expatiated freely in
letters; but he had done nothing which, like the cynical chaff of his
art students, suggests the not unskilful follower of Balzac and Dickens.
And he had given no hint of the elemental tragic power shown in the
great Ottima and Sebald scene, nor of the fierce and cruel sensuality,
the magnificence in sin, of Ottima herself.

[Footnote 17: _Letters of R. and E.B.B._, i. 28.]

[Footnote 18: Orr, _Handbook_, p. 55.]

_Pippa Passes_, the most romantic in conception of all Browning's plays,
thus first disclosed his genius for realism. _Strafford_, _King Victor_,
_The Druses_ are couched in the tempered ideality of blank verse; here
we pass to and fro from the airiest lyric to the most massive and sinewy
prose. It counted for something, too, that Italy, and above all the
little hill-town in which the scene was laid, was a vivid personal
memory, not a vague region of fancy like his Sardinia or Lebanon. Asolo,
with its walls and turret, its bishop's palace and duomo, and girls
sitting on the steps, its upland farms among the c