Of the four principal scenes, by far the greatest is the first, that between Ottima and her paramour, the German Sebald, on the morning after the murder of old Luca Gaddi, the woman's husband. It is difficult to convey in words any notion of its supreme excellence of tragic truth: to match it we must revert to almost the very finest Elizabethan work. The representation of Ottima and Sebald, the Italian and the German, is a singularly acute study of the Italian and German races. Sebald, in a sudden access of brutal rage, has killed the old doting husband, but his conscience, too feeble to stay his hand before, is awake to torture him after the deed. But Ottima is steadfast in evil, with the Italian conscienceless resoluteness. She can no more feel either fear or remorse than Clytæmnestra. The scene between Jules, the French sculptor, and his bride Phene, and that between Luigi, the light-headed Italian patriot, and his mother, are less great indeed, less tragic and intense and overpowering, than this crowning episode; but they are scarcely less fine and finished in a somewhat slighter style. Both are full of colour and music, of insight into nature and into art, and of superb lines and passages, such as this, which is spoken by Luigi:--
"God must be glad one loves his world so much. I can give news of earth to all the dead Who ask me:--last year's sunsets, and great stars That had a right to come first and see ebb The crimson wave that drifts the sun away-- Those crescent moons with notched and burning rims That strengthened into sharp fire, and there stood, Impatient of the azure--and that day In March, a double rainbow stopped the storm-- May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights-- Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"
But in neither is there any single passage of such incomparable quality as the thunderstorm in the first scene, a storm not to be matched in English poetry:--
"Buried in woods we lay, you recollect; Swift ran the searching tempest overhead; And ever and anon some bright white shaft Burned through the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, As if God's messenger through the close wood screen Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, Feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke The thunder like a whole sea overhead."