Pippa Passes is a verse drama by Robert Browning. It was published in 1841 as the first volume of his Bells and Pomegranates series, in a low-priced two-column edition for sixpence, and republished in his collected Poems of 1849, where it received much more critical attention. It was dedicated "most admiringly to the author of Ion", Thomas Noon Talfourd. It is best known for the lines "God's in his heaven— / All's right with the world!" Origins The author described the work as "the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals". A young, blameless silk-winding girl is wandering innocently through the environs of Asolo, attributing kindness and virtue to the people she passes. She sings as she goes, her song influencing others to act for the good—or, at the least, reminding them of the existence of a moral order. Alexandra Orr described the moment of inspiration: Another source for the work, according to David G. Riede, is that while working on a description of a Paduan peasant girl in book 3 of Sordello (1840), Browning came to the realization "that his art ought not to flatter the pretensions of the great, but to speak for the masses". In a letter to Fanny Haworth, he wrote that the "sad disheveled form" of the girl "wherein I put, comprize, typify and figure to myself Mankind, the whole poor-devildom one sees cuffed and huffed from morn to midnight" had inspired a resolution in him to "keep my pact in mind, prick up my republicanism". Pippa, a working-class girl from Asolo, not far from Padua, was the result of this pact. Structure Introduction The silk-winding girl Pippa rises on New Year's Day, her only day off for the whole year. Her thoughts concern the people she dubs "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones": Ottima, the wife of the rich silk-mill owner Luca Gaddi (and the lover of Sebald, a German) Jules, a French art student, who is today marrying Phene, a beautiful woman he knows only through her fan letters Luigi, an Italian patriot who lives with his mother in the turret on the hill Monsignor, a cleric I.—Morning Pippa passes a shrubhouse on the hillside, where Sebald and Ottima are trying to justify to each other the murder of Ottima's elderly husband, Luca. A group of art students, led by Lutwyche, discuss a cruel practical joke they are hoping to