in by the Archbishop as the duties of a wife is more intolerable than her earlier remoter aversion.  He is cheated of the dowry which lured him to marriage.  He is pointed at with smiling scorn by the gossips of Arezzo.  A gallant of the troop of Satan might have devised and executed some splendid revenge; but Guido is ever among the sutlers and camp-followers of the fiend, who are base before they are bold.  When he makes his final pleading for life in the cell of the New Prison by Castle Angelo, the animal cry, like that of a wild cat on whom the teeth of the trap have closed, is rendered shrill by the intensity of imagination with which he pictures to himself the apparatus of the scaffold and the hideous circumstance of his death.  His effort, as far as it is rational, is to transfer the guilt of his deeds to anyone or everyone but himself.  When all other resources fail he boldly lays the offence upon God, who has made him what he is.  It was a fine audacity of Browning in imagining the last desperate shriek of the wretched man, uttered as the black-hatted Brotherhood of Death descend the stairs singing their accursed psalm, to carry the climax of appeal to the powers of charity, “Christ,—­Maria,—­God,” one degree farther, and make the murderer last of all cry upon his victim to be his saviour from the death which he dares to name by the name of his own crime, a name which that crime might seem to have sequestered from all other uses:—­

“Pompilia, will you let them murder me?”

Pompilia is conceived by Browning not as a pale, passive victim, but as strong with a vivid, interior life, and not more perfect in patience than in her obedience to the higher law which summons her to resistance to evil and championship of the right.  Her purity is not the purity of ice but of fire.  When the Pope would find for himself a symbol to body forth her soul, it is not a lily that he thinks of but a rose.  Others may yield to the eye of God a “timid leaf” and an “uncertain bud,”

    While—­see how this mere chance sown, cleft-nursed seed
    That sprang up by the wayside ’neath the foot
    Of the enemy, this breaks all into blaze,
    Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire
    To incorporate the whole great sun it loves
    From the inch-height whence it looks and longs.  My flower,
    My rose, I gather for the breast of God.

As she lies on her pallet, dying “in the good house that helps the poor to die,” she is far withdrawn from the things of time; her life, with all its pleasures and its pains, seems strange and far away—­

    Looks old, fantastic and impossible: 
    I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.