". . . Me! Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself--kill me! Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me--then Yourself--then--presently--first hear me speak! I always meant to kill myself--wait, you! _Lean on my breast--not as a breast; don't love me The more because you lean on me, my own Heart's Sebald!_ There, there, both deaths presently!" * * * * * Here at last is the whole woman. "Lean on my breast--not as a breast"; "Mine is the whole crime"; "I always meant to kill myself--wait, you!" She will relinquish even her sense of womanhood; no word of blame for him; she would die, that he might live forgetting her, but it is too late for that, so "There, there, both deaths presently." . . . And now let us read again the lamentable dying words of Sebald. It is even more than I have said: not only are we meant to understand that Ottima's is the nobler spirit, but (I think) that not alone the passing of Pippa with her song has drawn this wealth of beauty from the broken woman's soul. Always it was there; it needed but the loved one's need to pour itself before him. "There, there, both deaths presently"--and in the dying, each is again revealed. He, all self-- "_My_ brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all _I_ feel" --and so on; while her sole utterance is-- "Not me--to him, O God, be merciful!" Pippa's song has, doubtlessly, saved them both, but Sebald as by direct intervention, Ottima as by the revelation of her truest self. Again, and yet again and again, we shall find in Browning this passion for "the courage of the deed"; and we shall find that courage oftenest assigned to women. For him, it was wellnigh the cardinal virtue to be brave--not always, as in Ottima, by the help of a native callousness, but assuredly always, as in her and in the far dearer women, by the help of an instinctive love for truth-- "Truth is the strong thing--let man's life be true!"