unconscious childhood is all but fled. Children--real children, naïve
and inarticulate, like little Fortù--rarely appear in his verse, and
those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like
Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home. In its
child pathos _The Pied Piper_--addressed to a child--stands all but
alone among his works. His choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and
unattached. Pippa, David, Pompilia, Bordello, Paracelsus, Balaustion,
Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as
work malignly upon their fate. Mildred has no mother, and she falls;
Sordello moves like a Shelleyan shadow about his father's house;
Balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual
daughter of Athens; Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of
"the secret of the world," which is his alone; Caponsacchi, himself
sisterless and motherless, releases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on
her by her parents' calculating greed; the song of Pippa releases Luigi
from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother's love.

More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in
Browning's poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the
City or the State, whose bond of membership, though less involuntary
than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of
material necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion,
or choice. Patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but
hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by Browning. Casa Guidi
windows betrayed too much. Two great communities alone moved his
imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of
common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a
common spiritual ideal. And Browning puts the loftiest passion for
Athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth
of a Jew of the dispersion. Responsive to the personal cry of the