Two possessions, out of what life has brought, remain with her—­the babe, who while yet unborn had converted her from a sufferer to a defender, and the friend who has saved her soul.  Even motherhood itself is not the deepest thing in Pompilia’s nature.  The little Gaetano, whom she had held in her arms for three days, will change; he will grow great, strong, stern, a tall young man, who cannot guess what she was like, who may some day have some hard thought of her.  He too withdraws into the dream of earth.  She can never lose him, and yet lose him she surely must; all she can do is by dying to give him “out-right to God, without a further care,” so to be safe.  But one experience of Pompilia’s life was quite out of time, and belongs by its mere essence to eternity.  Having laid her babe away with God, she must not even “think of him again, for gratitude”; and her last breath shall spend itself in doing service to earth by striving to make men know aright what earth will for a time possess and then, forever, heaven—­God’s servant, man’s friend, the saviour of the weak, the foe of all who are vile—­and to the gossips of Arezzo and of Rome the fribble and coxcomb and light-of-love priest, Caponsacchi.

If any point in the whole long poem, The Ring and the Book, can be described as central, it must be found in the relations, each to the other, of Caponsacchi and Pompilia.  The truth of it, as conceived by Browning, could hardly be told otherwise than in poetry, for it needs the faith that comes through spiritual beauty to render it comprehensible and credible, and such beauty is best expressed by art.  It is easy to convince the world of a passion between the sexes which is simply animal; nor is art much needed to help out the proof.  Happily the human love, in which body and soul play in varying degrees their parts, and each an honoured part, is in widest commonalty spread.  But the love that is wholly spiritual seems to some a supernatural thing, and if it be not discredited as utterly unreal (which at certain periods, if literature be a test, has been the case), it is apt to appear as a thing phantom-like, tenuous, and cold.  But, in truth, this reality once experienced makes the other realities appear the shadows, and it is an ardour as passionate as any that is known to man.  Its special note is a deliverance from self with a joy in abandonment to some thing other than self, like that which has been often recorded as an experience in religious conversion; when Bunyan, for example, ceased from the efforts to establish his own righteousness and saw that righteousness above him in the eternal heavens, he walked as a man suddenly illuminated, and could hardly forbear telling his joy to the crows upon the plough-land; and so, in its degree, with the spiritual exaltation produced by the love of man and woman when it touches a certain rare but real altitude.  If a poet can succeed in lifting up our hearts so that they may know for