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. . . Fortunately there is little changed here: my old Albergo, ruinous with earthquake is down and done with but few novelties are observable except the regrettable one that the silk industry has been transported elsewhere to Cornuda and other places nearer the main railway. No more Pippas at least of the silk-winding sort! 'But the pretty type is far from extinct.
It was a new metallic piston for the small steam-engine that gave motion to his silk-winding machinery. It was necessary that it should be done over night, in order that his factory should be at work as usual in the morning. My faithful Archy and I set to work accordingly.
Pippa, a poor little silk-winding girl, who has never known father or mother, opens the poem. It is the early morning and she wakes with joyous anticipation of her holiday, her only one. She goes forth, and we hear her singing and we see her influencing, from her humble position in the background, "Asolo's four happiest ones," who are brought by the action of the drama into the foreground.
Amatis, from Piedmont, who was engaged by the Trustees to introduce the art of silk-winding into the colony, and who for that purpose brought with him several Italians and some adequate machinery. White mulberry trees were planted in a portion of land on the eastern border of the city, called the Trustees' garden; eggs were hatched, and silk spun "as fine as any from France or Italy."
There is no light-hearted mirth, no real gaiety of temper anywhere in the dramas of Browning. Pippa's gladness in her holiday from the task of silk-winding is touched with pathos in the thought that what is so bright is also so brief, and it is encompassed, even within delightful Asolo, by the sins and sorrows of the world.
He was an honest man, they say, and comely; and he would have kept you and your mother far better than you ever can yourself, for all your spinning and silk-winding." "We are so poor!" she said passionately; "and mother has been ill so long, we should have become a burden to him. And then I never should have done for a signora.
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