herry orchards, its
beetles sparkling along the dust, its "warm slow yellow moonlit nights"
of May, and "glaring pomps" of June,--Asolo, with its legend of "Kate
the queen" and her carolling page, lives as few other spots do for
Browning's readers. Pippa herself, in her exquisite detachment from the
sordid humanity amid which she moves, might have appeared too like a
visionary presence, not of earth though on it, had she not been brought
into touch, at so many points, with things that Browning had seen.
_Pippa Passes_ has, among Browning's dramas, the same kind of peculiar
interest which belongs to the _Tempest_ and to _Faust_ among
Shakespeare's and Goethe's. Faery and devilry were not Browning's
affair; but, within the limits of his resolute humanism, _Pippa Passes_
is an ideal construction, shadowing forth, under the semblance of a
single definite bit of life, the controlling elements, as Browning
imagined them, in all life. For Browning, too, the world teemed with
Stephanos and Trinculos, Sebastians and Antonios; it was, none the less,
a magical Isle, where strange catastrophes and unsuspected revolutions
sprang suddenly into being at the unseen carol of Ariel as he passed.
Browning's Ariel is the organ of a spiritual power which, unlike
Prospero, seeks not merely to detect and avert crime, or merely to
dismiss the would-be criminal, forgiven, to "live and deal with others
better," but to renovate character; to release men from the bondage of
their egoisms by those influences, slight as a flower-bell or a sunset
touch, which renew us by setting all our aims and desires in a new
proportion.

II.

Browning's first four plays seemed to mark a growing neglect of the
requirements and traditions of the stage. He might even appear to have
renounced the stage altogether when in 1841 he arranged with Moxon to
publish his writings in a cheap pamphlet form. The first number of
_Bells and Pomegranates_ contained the least theatrical of his dramas,
_Pippa Passes_. "Two or three years ago" he declared in the preface (not
reprinted), "I wrote a play, about which the chief matter I much care to
recollect at present is that a Pit-full of good-natured people applauded
it. Ever since I have been desirous of doing something in the same way
that should better reward their attention. What follows I mean for the
first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals; and I
amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in wh