in its kind, but we transport ourselves best to the market-place of
Faenza by sitting in an easy chair.

_Pippa Passes_ is singular in its construction; scenes detached, though
not wholly disconnected, are strung pendant-wise upon the gold thread,
slender but sufficiently strong, of an idea; realism in art, as we now
call it, hangs from a fine idealism; this substantial globe of earth
with its griefs, its grossnesses, its heroism, swings suspended from the
seat of God. The idea which gives unity to the whole is not a mere
fantasy. The magic practised by the unconscious Pippa through her songs
is of that genuine and beautiful kind which the Renaissance men of
science named "Magia Naturalis." It is no fantasy but a fact that each
of us influences the lives of others more or less every day, and at
times in a peculiar degree, in ways of which we are not aware. Let this
fact be seized with imaginative intensity, and let the imagination
render it into a symbol--we catch sight of Pippa with her songs passing
down the grass-paths and under the pine-wood of Asolo. Her only service
to God on this one holiday of a toilsome year is to be glad. She
misconceives everything that concerns "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones"--to
her fancy Ottima is blessed with love, Jules is no victim of an envious
trick, Luigi's content in his lot is deep and unassailable, and
Monsignor is a holy and beloved priest; and, unawares to her, in modes
far other than she had imagined, each of her dreams comes true; even
Monsignor for one moment rises into the sacred avenger of God. Her own
service, though she knows it not, is more than a mere twelve-hours'
gladness; she, the little silk-winder, rays forth the influences of a
heart that has the potency ascribed to gems of unflawed purity; and such
influences--here embodied in the symbol of a song--are among the
precious realities of our life. Nowhere in literature has the virtue of
mere innocent gladness been more charmingly imagined than in her